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Why I ever wrote Clojure

thesoftwarephilosopher.com

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Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#51

Post by daveliepmann »

zerr wrote: post #39
dunk010 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.

Why not quite the niche though? Clojure doesn't make writing corporate CRUD apps enjoyable.

He wasn't writing corporate CRUD apps, he was working on systems like radio broadcasting, voting machines, and Datomic, which involve significant concurrency challenges.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#52

Post by daveliepmann »

sbjs wrote: post #34
dunk010 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.

I guess that confirms my theory.

He didn't mean he'd quit out of boredom, he meant he'd quit out of frustration with proglangs that bite you in the ass when writing e.g. concurrent programs

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#53

Post by fulafel »

edem wrote: post #12
daveliepmann wrote: post #2

>I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored. I notice too that a noticeable number of people pick up Clojure because it's new and shiny. As a longtime Clojurian I find that attitude can be disappointing to run into, like when you realize a growing friendship will die because they're not serious about living in your city. I don't claim to know the man but the reasons Rich w…

he said somewhere that he was inspired by Whiteheas's book "Process and Reality"

Online version: https://archive.org/details/processreality0000alfr

Author is Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician & philosopher.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#54

Post by zerr »

epolanski wrote: post #44
zerr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not quite the niche though? Clojure doesn't make writing corporate CRUD apps enjoyable.

I don't think the particular niche matters, eventually everything becomes being a mundane job. I know few people that made it in shiny businesses (Serie A and Champions League players like Fabio Liverani and Simone Pepe, or Massimiliano Rosolino swimming gold metal at Olympics) and they all absolutely either hated or found 99.9% of their career an endless marathon of mundane boring activities. I'm not saying there ar…

Agree. Although, as opposed to physical performance activities, be it sports or music, where one of the key activities is to repeat the same thing thousand times, in software, we strive towards not repeating the same thing.

Re: Why I ever wrote Clojure

#55

Post by froh »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #43
froh wrote: post #28

new languages are created to push the boundaries for manageable essential complexity, by reducing "accidental" complexity. clojure's data structures for example enable simpler concurrent work on stupid enterprise data. however. I've seen favorite hot fancy XYZ bit rot in large enterprise code bases. the oh so bored original author long gone. boring architecture documentation missing. business critical underdocumented…

Clojure is burned-by-OOP simplicity, not bored-genius complexity.

clojure is great! I was talking about introducing clojure/rust/whatever just for being bored.
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