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Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

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Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#61

Post by zerr »

kls wrote: post #42
decebalus1 wrote: post #4

I don't know what's wrong with me but I gave Clojure 3 tries in the past and every time I try to actually build something (aside from 4clojure and solving hackerrank problems with it) I get lost in the tooling and just give up then fallback to familiar frameworks\languages. It just doesn't click with me and the whole leinengen\ring\compojure just seems weird and backhanded.

For me lisp in general was like that. But I just kept on until it clicked (mainly because I was getting sick of hearing all the hype and wanted to fully understand what all the fuss was about). A lot of people talk about when lisp clicks its an ahh-haa moment much like when your first programming language clicks and that is the best way to describe it. When it finally clicks it clicks but you have to put aside so muc…

> For me lisp in general was like that. But I just kept on until it clicked

Not sure this is the right way... I mean, everything will "click" if you do the same, e.g. VB6, but do you want this?

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#62

Post by justaaron »

westoncb wrote: post #36
base698 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of reminds me of this: http://web.archive.org/web/20160304105922/http://www.lambdas... "Another feature about this guy is his low threshold of boredom. He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at it, accomplishing wonders in a short time and then get bored and drop it before its properly finished. He'll do nothing but strum his guitar and lie around in bed for several days after. That's also part of the patt…

That's a very nice essay—and unfortunately, I found myself described very accurately in it. I'm currently unemployed, sitting adjacent to a large pile of empty Indian food takeout bags, skimming a book on Abstract Algebra to better understand a paper on theory of deep neural networks—all of which has no connection to any lasting thing I'm doing aside from not working on a side project which happens to be at a local m…

smell the whiff of death a few times, realize that your time on earth is limited, stop messing around, and make each stroke of your blade count (and follow through)

only you can ride your private racehorse. everyone else who tried got thrown. get on and ride.

basically, one has the tools to be a proper cyborg ninja, and the only thing stopping one are minor personal vanities that actually deliver minimal pleasure compared to the pain they create in blocking ones self-realization. ditch em :)

*i find yoga, stretching, exercise, etc. helps to gather the passion and focus to unleash it when sitting still again...

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#64

Post by snowcrshd »

plinkplonk wrote: post #58

The best Clojure book in my personal experience (and fwiw) is O'Reilly's "Clojure Programming" by Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, and Christophe Grand. Extremely clear writing, and very knowledgeable authors. I really enjoyed working through the book. Due Disclosure: 1. I was an experienced Haskell and Java programmer, when I read the books, so I didn't have to go through any culture shocks wrt either Java or FP. 2. I ha…

Just adding my 2 cents.

I've found the writing of Clojure Programming to be very dull, to be honest.

Sure, it is clear and detailed, but it gets boring after a while.

I think the Joy of Clojure is a better read (at least for me). The upside about Clojure Programming is that it covers the language's syntax right upfront, which (IIRC) Joy of Clojure does not.

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#65

Post by westoncb »

justaaron wrote: post #62
westoncb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very nice essay—and unfortunately, I found myself described very accurately in it. I'm currently unemployed, sitting adjacent to a large pile of empty Indian food takeout bags, skimming a book on Abstract Algebra to better understand a paper on theory of deep neural networks—all of which has no connection to any lasting thing I'm doing aside from not working on a side project which happens to be at a local m…

smell the whiff of death a few times, realize that your time on earth is limited, stop messing around, and make each stroke of your blade count (and follow through) only you can ride your private racehorse. everyone else who tried got thrown. get on and ride. basically, one has the tools to be a proper cyborg ninja, and the only thing stopping one are minor personal vanities that actually deliver minimal pleasure com…

I think that's probably pretty on point. Thanks.

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#66

Post by westoncb »

mos_basik wrote: post #60
westoncb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very nice essay—and unfortunately, I found myself described very accurately in it. I'm currently unemployed, sitting adjacent to a large pile of empty Indian food takeout bags, skimming a book on Abstract Algebra to better understand a paper on theory of deep neural networks—all of which has no connection to any lasting thing I'm doing aside from not working on a side project which happens to be at a local m…

An ADD diagnosis in my twenties and an Adderall prescription have done wonders for my depression (gone), unemployment (working), self esteem (good), ability to maintain interest in projects (more fun than video games), sleep schedule (regularish) and social life (I now actually initiate plans to do things with humans now and then). Before consulting with professionals, I'd never considered this might be my problem be…

I've wondered about this. I think I'm gonna see a psychiatrist soon and just present the anomalies in my background and see if they come to the same conclusion...

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#67

Post by snowcrshd »

chrisoakman wrote: post #48
LargeWu wrote: post #46

The entire second chapter is devoted to learning emacs. I find this to be a baffling editing decision. "Thanks for reading this book, but before we cover what you came for, let's do this other completely orthogonal thing first."

I totally agree the overhead of learning Emacs is orthogonal from learning Lisp. IMO, it's a shame that there is such a strong association between that tooling ecosystem and Lisp languages. I think it pushes a lot of newcomers away from the learning process. One of the design goals of Parinfer[1] is to help reduce the cognitive load of Lisp syntax for newcomers. Hopefully more introductory texts adopt it as part of t…

Wow, those docs are pretty good!

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#68

Post by shadowmint »

chrisoakman wrote: post #47
shadowmint wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot, but it totally mystifies me. You lose all the good parts of clojure when you go into the js runtime; stm, parallel processing, java interop, hot reloading, and it pulls in some really quite large js dependencies, and it's impossible to debug. Even console logging becomes a case of 'convert to readable object and log' using special helpers. What's the benefit? I don't see any meaningful reason to us…

I'm not sure when your last exposure to the ClojureScript ecosystem was, but almost nothing you mention is a problem as of 2016: debugging, hot reloading, large JS deps, etc. I'm biased, but I think ClojureScript is the best way to use the JavaScript platform today. Awesome core library, consistent build process, best of breed tooling, persistent data structures, flexible syntax (JSX is madness compared to hiccups);…

Got a link with specifics?

I've never seen breakpoints & source maps working properly; just a series of blog posts by various people who've tried and failed to get it working.

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#69

Post by TickleSteve »

decebalus1 wrote: post #4

I don't know what's wrong with me but I gave Clojure 3 tries in the past and every time I try to actually build something (aside from 4clojure and solving hackerrank problems with it) I get lost in the tooling and just give up then fallback to familiar frameworks\languages. It just doesn't click with me and the whole leinengen\ring\compojure just seems weird and backhanded.

Same here,

I found the concepts in Clojure attractive and elegant but the implementation to be lacking.

The toolchain is extremely heavyweight and any promised performance, scalability and development improvements just don't materialise.

Like you, I've only tried toy projects, but Clojures weight and lack of real (as opposed to promised) improvement never occurred for me.

Also, there seems to be constant discussions on the Clojure forums about the lack of performance.... and they all get resolved by admitting that you need to fallback to non-idiomatic Clojure (i.e. just doing it the Java way).

Re: Clojure for the Brave and True (2015)

#70

Post by TheSmoke »

decebalus1 wrote: post #4

I don't know what's wrong with me but I gave Clojure 3 tries in the past and every time I try to actually build something (aside from 4clojure and solving hackerrank problems with it) I get lost in the tooling and just give up then fallback to familiar frameworks\languages. It just doesn't click with me and the whole leinengen\ring\compojure just seems weird and backhanded.

if you can tell us more about your pain points, i think we can help you give clojure another try but for this time going forward and not falling back to previous tools.
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