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Building a Startup on Clojure

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Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#81

Post by capableweb »

mylons wrote: post #79

re-iterating what onion2k said, hard pass on building a company around an esoteric language. enjoy attempting to hire people to work on this. best case you get an eager programmer wanting to learn the language. worst case you get zero experienced hires unless you’re a massive success.

That "best case" seems dishonest at best. How is the best case not "Best case you get awesome programmers with lots of experience and knowledge about what Clojure is all about, being able to ship software better than anyone else" or similar?

Clojure has pitfalls for sure, but no need to be dishonest in order to flag them.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#82

Post by zerr »

onion2k wrote: post #2

If I was choosing a language to base the tech stack for a startup on these days I'd be very reluctant to pick anything that didn't have a local user group. Slightly more esoteric languages that enable you to write better code faster are brilliant, but if you're successful enough to grow quickly, or you can raise funding, you'll need to hire devs relatively early on. If you've chosen a stack that's too esoteric then t…

How long does it take for some non-Python dev to become a Python dev? One week? Two?

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#83

Post by aidenn0 »

beiller wrote: post #8

I worked at a startup that was built on Clojure. It had trouble finding developers for reasonable salaries at the early mid stage. They decided to switch the stack to python at that point. Just an anecdote!

I don't know how any non-FAANG companies in the bay area hire non-junior developers. I have 4 kids and the difference in mortgage payments alone for relocating there is well into 5 figures per year.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#84

Post by Scarbutt »

haolez wrote: post #80
mylons wrote: post #79

re-iterating what onion2k said, hard pass on building a company around an esoteric language. enjoy attempting to hire people to work on this. best case you get an eager programmer wanting to learn the language. worst case you get zero experienced hires unless you’re a massive success.

The real worst case scenario is facing a competitor that's much faster than you on implementing new features and testing hypothesis. Using an esoteric language might be one of the leverages that this competitor has against your tight mainstream stack.

In 2022 thinking that your esoteric language is going to help you implement new features faster than with a mainstream language is just plain language zealotry.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#85

Post by kaba0 »

ithrow wrote: post #62
kaba0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably the JVM is a better backend platform, due to better performance, observability, scalability, parallelism (it is not even a competition, and then we haven’t even talked about Loom), plus the least objective point of mine, more stable, battle tested libraries.

That's like saying that C++ is a better backend platform than the JVM due to better performance. For 95% of business web apps out there it doesn't matter, I mean, multiple business with evaluations in the billions of dollars have been created with runtimes 50x slower than nodejs. Nodejs competes with Java in single threaded performance, I'll say normal JS code is faster than normal Java code. For web services that ar…

You may have missed the other 10 reasons I listed besides performance.

Also, no JS code will be faster than Java. While both have insanely good JIT compilers that can output some truly, often surprisingly great machine code, java is all-around faster, if for no other reason, due to its killer GCs.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#86

Post by aidenn0 »

ducktective wrote: post #11

While we are at it, anyone knows what's the Common Lisp story in webdev? Both backend and frontend?

I am a hobbyist lisp developer and have written webapps in CL.

I use cl-who[1] for generating html and parenscript for javascript. I use clack on the backend, but hunchentoot is probably more popular. Both backends have plenty of routing libraries available (hunchentoot comes with a decent one baked in, clack does not).

postmodern is a Postgres specific sql backend that is great. There are database-agnostic SQL libraries as well (clsql and cl-dbi I believe are the two big ones) but I haven't tried them.

1: People whose opinions I trust have told me that spinneret is a better choice. It did not exist when I learned cl-who. cl-who is "good enough" for me that I haven't switched.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#87

Post by mradek »

onion2k wrote: post #2

If I was choosing a language to base the tech stack for a startup on these days I'd be very reluctant to pick anything that didn't have a local user group. Slightly more esoteric languages that enable you to write better code faster are brilliant, but if you're successful enough to grow quickly, or you can raise funding, you'll need to hire devs relatively early on. If you've chosen a stack that's too esoteric then t…

Also a point for node: in the time people have argued about how node sucks (some valid points, all easily mitigated) and how X is better, they could have already shipped a bunch of nice features.

Focusing only on web stuff.. If you have a good grasp of design patterns and you can build out your system in a modular way, I think node is a great starting point.

I love starting with node because typescript is awesome, the performance is nice, the community support is tremendous, the scaling is easy, and finally it’s easy to move off it. If some part of the system starts becoming a bottleneck, just swap that piece out for something more suitable. One thing I like about this time right now is that most things are built just fine to be used in creating something new and useful products.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#88

Post by haolez »

Scarbutt wrote: post #84
haolez wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real worst case scenario is facing a competitor that's much faster than you on implementing new features and testing hypothesis. Using an esoteric language might be one of the leverages that this competitor has against your tight mainstream stack.

In 2022 thinking that your esoteric language is going to help you implement new features faster than with a mainstream language is just plain language zealotry.

I disagree.

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#89

Post by ldite »

Ah clojure. It's all fun and games until five years down the line, you've had 100% dev churn, and you have a 100kloc codebase that nobody understands, full of functions that don't give the slightest hint of the shape of the data they're processing (it's all lists!) yet down the bottom of the callstack there's some function that'll explode if the map doesn't have whatever magical key it expects.

If you're really lucky, someone will have thrown in a bunch of 'specs' that make a bunch of assertions about the data, put them on the API entry points, and then scattered some slightly different specs with slightly more restrictive assertions on various 'internal APIs', resulting in random explosions in production!

And the joy of working with an esoteric language is that it attracts esoteric developers, who often get frustrated by the requirements of being a software engineer in a large company (i.e. everything that's not writing code), which leads to the aforementioned 100% dev churn (after a lot of shouting).

Re: Building a Startup on Clojure

#90

Post by staticelf »

hypersoar wrote: post #38

For me, the killer feature of Clojure is "REPL driven development". The ability to get rapid feedback as you build things up is incredible. I'll make a comment form and evaluate expressions within it to try things out as I go. By the time I've written any reasonably complex function, all of the pieces have been tested on various examples. Once I'm done, the comment form leaves a helpful record of my thought process.…

I don't understand, doesn't most languages these days have a REPL?
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