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Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

clojure.org

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Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#61

Post by jwr »

agentifysh wrote: post #6

is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged

I work on a large Clojure codebase with AI, and I'm getting excellent results. Likely factors are code density, the resulting token density, and a lot of well-architected code that the AI can follow — I'm not sure exactly, but the results are really good.

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#62

Post by yogsototh »

agentifysh wrote: post #6

is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged

Personally this is a hidden trick I use.

Ask AI to build something. By default it will use python. Sometimes js or typescript.

Ask then to do the same thing in Clojure. The result is generally an order of magnitude better. Shorter, easier to read for both humans and llm. Easier to adapt to changes.

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#63

Post by embedding-shape »

slifin wrote: post #59

Looking back Clojure has been the best thing to happen to me in this industry I doubled my salary using it and changed industries to much more stable industries I've been to a lot of conferences and meet ups in my career but the feeling of joy and inclusivity at Heart of Clojure was unreal The community is still alive and well, my favourite passionate sub culture in the Clojure community at the moment is the Jank com…

> What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL

Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering the first "real" reason I had for moving wholesale to Clojure was a shorter feedback loop. If that's not one of your goals when moving to Clojure, I'm not sure what you're up to really.

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#64

Post by jgalt212 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #63
slifin wrote: post #59

Looking back Clojure has been the best thing to happen to me in this industry I doubled my salary using it and changed industries to much more stable industries I've been to a lot of conferences and meet ups in my career but the feeling of joy and inclusivity at Heart of Clojure was unreal The community is still alive and well, my favourite passionate sub culture in the Clojure community at the moment is the Jank com…

> What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering…

Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#65

Post by embedding-shape »

jgalt212 wrote: post #64
embedding-shape wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering…

Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.

Sure, so once a week or so you need to restart the process if you end up like that.

What I've seen people do, is restart the process after each change like you typically do in other languages, rather than evaluating the current form...

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#66

Post by embedding-shape »

yogsototh wrote: post #62
agentifysh wrote: post #6

is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged

Personally this is a hidden trick I use. Ask AI to build something. By default it will use python. Sometimes js or typescript. Ask then to do the same thing in Clojure. The result is generally an order of magnitude better. Shorter, easier to read for both humans and llm. Easier to adapt to changes.

Not to mention that changes are easier to review, because there is less of them. Same semantic diff for JavaScript and Clojure looks vastly different, and I'll favor to review Clojure changes any day of the week.

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#67

Post by embedding-shape »

hsaliak wrote: post #20
agentifysh wrote: post #6

is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged

Clojure had lousy error messages, agents deal with this well. Clojure is capable of producing some of the most dense code I’ve ever seen, so manual code reviews really start to feel like a bottleneck unless your goal is to level up.

> Clojure is capable of producing some of the most dense code I’ve ever seen, so manual code reviews really start to feel like

For me it's the opposite, the dense code is easier to review, because the proposed changes are almost always smaller and more informative. Contrast a change in a typical TypeScript project where changes propagate across tens of files, that you need to jump in-between just to understand the context. In the time it takes me to ramp up understanding what the change is, I've already completed the review of a change in a Clojure program.

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#68

Post by slifin »

jwr wrote: post #61
agentifysh wrote: post #6

is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged

I work on a large Clojure codebase with AI, and I'm getting excellent results. Likely factors are code density, the resulting token density, and a lot of well-architected code that the AI can follow — I'm not sure exactly, but the results are really good.

Yeah I see this at work - people are sceptical that AI + Clojure even works

but in my experience its amazing the overall quality of Clojure code in the wild tends to be higher than your typical language so AI's training on Clojure tends to be on modern and high quality code and the language is very token efficient, you can also tell AI to interact with the REPL to avoid restarts

The only downside I've seen reported is mis-matched parens but for me models have been strong enough to balance parens for about a year at least it's not something I actively work-around even though there are work-arounds like brepl and others

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#69

Post by JB024066 »

malindasp wrote: post #19

The double belt buckle is a pretty classic diffusion model artifact — it struggles with symmetrical accessories because it's essentially pattern-matching textures rather than understanding "this person is wearing one belt." Same reason you see six-fingered hands. The repeated code on the steps is actually the more interesting tell to me. An artist would vary that deliberately for visual interest. A model just tiles w…

According to the documentary group it was hand drawn:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashion...

Re: Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

#70

Post by cfiggers »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
jgalt212 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.

Sure, so once a week or so you need to restart the process if you end up like that. What I've seen people do, is restart the process after each change like you typically do in other languages, rather than evaluating the current form...

The thing that happens to me is that I'll get something working in the REPL, then try to deploy it and it breaks—because unbeknownst to me, I had gotten my REPL into some state where everything was working, but a cold start doesn't look the same.

Is this a skill issue? Absolutely. Do I still restart the REPL frequently (not after every def, but often) just to make sure I'm working with the same environment my program will be experiencing at run time? Yes I absolutely do.

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