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Clojure-powered Startups

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Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#51

Post by [deleted] »

pbiggar wrote: post #33
Estragon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should interact pretty well with JRuby on Rails, but I'm not sure you would get any benefit from using rails over a Clojure web framework like Noir.

I honestly think you should avoid this. We did this, and it's a nightmare, and we had to get rid of it. Rails works very well if you stick to defaults. Each time you veer a little bit further from the defaults, things start to break (or at least require a lot more advanced knowledge to keep working). We had a front-end in in JRuby-on-Rails, backend in clojure, in the same app/process. We had a "middle-end" which tran…

[deleted]

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#52

Post by pbiggar »

Estragon wrote: post #50
pbiggar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think you should avoid this. We did this, and it's a nightmare, and we had to get rid of it. Rails works very well if you stick to defaults. Each time you veer a little bit further from the defaults, things start to break (or at least require a lot more advanced knowledge to keep working). We had a front-end in in JRuby-on-Rails, backend in clojure, in the same app/process. We had a "middle-end" which tran…

Thanks for the correction, good to know. In the example you describe, the main mismatch seems to have been getting the two Ruby runtimes to communicate effectively. Was that a common theme?

I think the most important thing is "complexity is multiplicative". Every slight deviation from normal led to subtle errors that took days to fix, and kept coming back in different ways. The runtimes was just the most WTF way this happened.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#53

Post by espeed »

andrewvc wrote: post #38

Frankly, the selling point that clojure minimizes risk is not a compelling one. It sounds sexy, but its nonsensical. Risk encompasses many aspects of technical decisions and there's a complicated set of interactions between these aspects. Saying a single language minimizes risk makes little sense. For instance, if you're building a straight-up CRUD web app Ruby on Rails minimizes risk best. If you're building a realt…

I don't think we need a slogan to promote Clojure, we need more killer platforms. We need problem-spaces where when someone asks "What's the highest quality implementation of X?" people say, well, clojure has XYZ, it's way ahead of the pack.

Datomic (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-Design-of-Datomic) is going to be one of Clojure's killer apps -- it adds durability to Clojure's immutable, persistent data structures, and it rethinks datastore design, from the ground up, to take advantage of modern storage services.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#54

Post by groovy2shoes »

reddit_clone wrote: post #46
gecko wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it has parity, for all of the reasons halgari noted, but I really don't feel that it offers much over F#, either. F# is a very solid answer to Clojure in all ways except macros: it solves similar problems in the same problem space, doing some things better and some things worse. I happen to have a slight preference for F#, but at any rate, I don't think you're missing anything by being on one or the oth…

You are selling an ML variant for someone looking for a lisp variant. Good luck with that!

"Any sufficiently well-documented Lisp program contains an ML program in its comments."

(My Google-Fu is failing me; I can't find an attribution.)

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#55

Post by edwinnathaniel »

jwr wrote: post #17
nivertech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From this description it seems that Erlang/OTP would be even better choice than Clojure: we literally pack million of concurrect users into 1 high memory AWS instance. Though Erlang not as modern or elegant as Clojure, but there is also LFE and Joxa.

It depends on how many external libraries you need. We considered both Clojure and Erlang in our project, ended up going with Clojure mostly because of available and easily accessible Java libraries. I still find it amazing that I can: 1) add a single line to my project.clj (which will set up dependencies and download libs), 2) add a single line to my :import section at the top of the source file, 3) there is no poin…

Leiningen probably has its root from Maven, which IMHO the killer tool for Java. I've done .NET, a bit of Python, and RoR development/toying/experimentation in the past, and you need Bundler+Rake+RubyGem (at least) to emulate the core (important) feature of Maven.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#56

Post by Estragon »

espeed wrote: post #53
andrewvc wrote: post #38

Frankly, the selling point that clojure minimizes risk is not a compelling one. It sounds sexy, but its nonsensical. Risk encompasses many aspects of technical decisions and there's a complicated set of interactions between these aspects. Saying a single language minimizes risk makes little sense. For instance, if you're building a straight-up CRUD web app Ruby on Rails minimizes risk best. If you're building a realt…

I don't think we need a slogan to promote Clojure, we need more killer platforms. We need problem-spaces where when someone asks "What's the highest quality implementation of X?" people say, well, clojure has XYZ, it's way ahead of the pack. Datomic ( http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-Design-of-Datomic ) is going to be one of Clojure's killer apps -- it adds durability to Clojure's immutable, persistent data str…

Datomic is super cool design-wise. It'd be great to see some apps actually using it.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#57

Post by TheSmoke »

notb wrote: post #11
playing_colours wrote: post #8

Does it make sense to try using both Clojure and Rails in web app, Rails for UI and Clojure for more sophisticated business logic?

I would say yes if you build the Clojure component as a separate service that the Rails app makes calls to. Or I guess you could simply build it as a Java class and use Rails to execute it.

this is what twitter is doing with scala i believe.

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#58

Post by batista »

Estragon wrote: post #49

That was embarassing, and 20 minutes of my life I regret losing. Even the speaker appeared to be embarassed at times. It's interesting that this thread has stayed on the front page of HN all day. I wonder how many people upvoted/participated in it without watching it? (I must admit, I participated without watching the whole thing.)

Noticed how your comment doesn't mention any actual complaints with the presentation?

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#59

Post by Ygg2 »

I believe the data is deceptive. Growth is fine and dandy but if you look at this graph http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure%2C+scala%2C+java&#... Tells a wholly different story than this one: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure%2C+scala%2C+java&#...

Also didn't reddit switch from clojure/lisp-like language to python?

Re: Clojure-powered Startups

#60

Post by runevault »

Ygg2 wrote: post #59

I believe the data is deceptive. Growth is fine and dandy but if you look at this graph http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure%2C+scala%2C+java&#... Tells a wholly different story than this one: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure%2C+scala%2C+java&#... Also didn't reddit switch from clojure/lisp-like language to python?

They switched from common lisp to python, which is an entirely different beast. CLisp is an awesome language, and obviously has the same roots in McCarthy's work, but they have different advantages/disadvantages (the library situation is better on the JVM, for example).
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