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Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

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Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#81

Post by roenxi »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #37
rawoke083600 wrote: post #20

I've started learning Clojure about a year ago, couldn't say it was easy (the fault might be with me and not Clojure) Clojure has a lot a faults (just look at some of the comments here) BUT and it's a BIG BUT for me... Clojure is SUPER FUN :) Over the years(15+), I've been coding in PHP (suck it haters), Go, Rust,Java,Python AngularJS+, Svelte and I can honestly say for me, nothing is more fun that coding in Clojure.…

Clojure user here since 2010(my earliest Clojure project on Github), and while I agree with the fun point, the iceberg wart for me at this point is the inelegance of the interface hierarchy and its structure behind the scenes. Clojure's forward-facing interface (a hundred functions that operate on one data structure) ended up breaking down for me at some point and became 10 functions on 10 data structures and those d…

An interesting complaint. What problem domain(s) do you work in? It sounds like you've found something that Clojure isn't a great fit for.

The mix of interfaces would be a huge pain if you needed their specific behaviours, but in my experience they've never mattered and lings like LazySeq just act as performance optimisations.

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#82

Post by yenda »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #37
rawoke083600 wrote: post #20

I've started learning Clojure about a year ago, couldn't say it was easy (the fault might be with me and not Clojure) Clojure has a lot a faults (just look at some of the comments here) BUT and it's a BIG BUT for me... Clojure is SUPER FUN :) Over the years(15+), I've been coding in PHP (suck it haters), Go, Rust,Java,Python AngularJS+, Svelte and I can honestly say for me, nothing is more fun that coding in Clojure.…

Clojure user here since 2010(my earliest Clojure project on Github), and while I agree with the fun point, the iceberg wart for me at this point is the inelegance of the interface hierarchy and its structure behind the scenes. Clojure's forward-facing interface (a hundred functions that operate on one data structure) ended up breaking down for me at some point and became 10 functions on 10 data structures and those d…

Do you have some os projects out there to share where you had to do that? Makes me curious, I think the only time I've ended up making a specific data structure in clojure was for a library for perf reasons. In application code basically never.

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#83

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #77
lenkite wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets say that someone wants to improve on Clojure and make a better functional, immutable LISP! What should they start with ? Some things I miss is type support (for easy refactoring, auto documentation and performance), (small) native compilation, support for mobile platforms and their UI's, first-class web-assembly support, real structs and misc things like performant implementations for `first`, `last` and other c…

If you want an easy win, one thing Rich mentioned in a talk is - if he had to do Clojure all over again today - he would put transducers at the 'bottom'. For data transformation this makes the underlying collection type largely immaterial. > real structs I'm not even sure if value types are conducive towards immutable, persistent data structures. I'm certainly excited for project Valhalla but I'm not sure if Clojure,…

Yes on the type support not really attracting Clojure users. If you wanted to enable better refactoring, the thing to do would be to take more pages from other lisps and use the compiler to add more metadata to the runtime (in development mode at least) so that you can get better tracking of the language constructs.

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#84

Post by roenxi »

eduction wrote: post #26
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #7

I love Clojure the language but I’ve never seen a more fragmented ecosystem. There seems to be a pattern in the language of “a problem emerges > a community solution gains traction > Cognitect develops their own solution but its weird and undocumented”, like deps.edn over leiningen, spec over malli, pedestal over ring, etc. Many prominent clojurists recommend deps.edn over leiningen and socket repl over nrepl, but I’…

I think your pattern is right except for "its weird and undocumented" - I have found the maintainers are superb at docs - e.g. deps.edn - there is a "Guide" https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli there is a "Getting Started" https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started (it's branded as an overall Clojure getting started but the core of deps is just the clj/clojure command line tool you would use to install clojure) th…

"Superb" is not the word for deps.edn documentation. It is certainly documented but the gap between most Clojure documentation and the deps.edn documentation page is big. I suspect Rich wrote most of it but left the deps.edn page to someone else.The deps pages have a knack for includng pages of waffle that doesn't help to solve the current problem.

If a newbie is trying to debug

    {:deps
     {ring/ring-devel {:mvn/version "1.9.6"}}
     {ring/ring-core {:mvn/version "1.9.6"}}}
=> Error building classpath. Error reading edn. Map literal must contain an even number of forms

They have to notice that while they got 80% of their maps right, the file itself if a map with 3 forms. This is compounded by the fact that there are no examples of a multi-dependency project in the getting started page! If you know Clojure, this is an easy puzzle. For rookies, they didn't use (map) so the error message will probably trick some percent of them.

I don't think the deps documentation has been validated to provide what people actually want to know. Technically it is probably thorough, but "Superb" is a high bar it does not reach.

Probably the proper approach is learning deps by copying other people. Trying to learn it from the docs didn't work for me (it did for the rest of Clojure, so that was an unpleasant change).

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#85

Post by yogthos »

agumonkey wrote: post #54
yogthos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working with Clojure for the past decade, and it's still the most enjoyable development experience I've had. Once you experience using an interactive workflow where you can see the results from the code you're writing live, it's really hard to go back.

I physically suffer when I go back to systems like django, where there's no principled underpinnings, no 'protocol' and only a thin way to interact with the system live. Curse of good languages.

indeed

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#86

Post by [deleted] »

yenda wrote: post #82
kelseyfrog wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clojure user here since 2010(my earliest Clojure project on Github), and while I agree with the fun point, the iceberg wart for me at this point is the inelegance of the interface hierarchy and its structure behind the scenes. Clojure's forward-facing interface (a hundred functions that operate on one data structure) ended up breaking down for me at some point and became 10 functions on 10 data structures and those d…

Do you have some os projects out there to share where you had to do that? Makes me curious, I think the only time I've ended up making a specific data structure in clojure was for a library for perf reasons. In application code basically never.

[deleted]

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#87

Post by jjnoakes »

phforms wrote: post #60
rawoke083600 wrote: post #20

I've started learning Clojure about a year ago, couldn't say it was easy (the fault might be with me and not Clojure) Clojure has a lot a faults (just look at some of the comments here) BUT and it's a BIG BUT for me... Clojure is SUPER FUN :) Over the years(15+), I've been coding in PHP (suck it haters), Go, Rust,Java,Python AngularJS+, Svelte and I can honestly say for me, nothing is more fun that coding in Clojure.…

Same here, started using Clojure pretty much exclusively about a year ago and never looked back. It was rough to get to that comfortable state where I am now, having to find out how Clojure CLI tools work, what Java Classpaths are, how to properly set up my editor (Neovim), how to make sense of Clojure internals like “seq” and when to use which collection type (and when not to care), etc. But it has also been a fun a…

> treats you like an adult who can make responsible decisions on their own

I have to disagree with this characterization. It also seems a bit patronizing.

Having more choice can be good in some cases, and having fewer choices can be good in other cases. One isn't treating you less like an adult than the other.

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#88

Post by ARandomerDude »

ndr wrote: post #12
ARandomerDude wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a great choice for unopinionated server-side web development. Frontend development is simply awesome in ClojureScript. Give me Reagent + Shadow CLJS over plain React (or React Native) any day.

For you and anyone else with experience, is that the most common/battle-tested cljs stack? What about servers-side, any equivalent Django or FastAPI?

No affiliation, but I think this is a great example CRUD API.

https://github.com/dharrigan/startrek

Re: Clojure Turns 15 panel discussion video

#89

Post by yogthos »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #41
dack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think the hype cycle with Clojure looks like this: Stage 1: Confused by parens/the lispiness. early uncertainty Stage 2: learn the REPL and library functions and fall in love. irrational exuberance Stage 3: build an unmaintainable mess and can't refactor. trough of sorrow Stage 4: figure out how to decouple appropriately and evolve the codebase rather than refactor all the time. live happily ever after!

Stage5: All other languages and their syntax now looks ugly and wrong. I'm mean for heavens sake put the parens on the outside ! We are not heathens. Lol only half joking. It really did surprise me how can something I hated some much in the beginning of learning Clojure (all the parens) has now become one of the things I most adore about the language (all the parens)

It's really hard for me to see any justifications for a syntax that's not based around s-expressions. The benefits of being able to trivially transform any code as data and have powerful structural editing facilities outweigh any perceived downsides in my experience. I also find that s-exps act as a visual diagramming tool making your code more scannable because you can visually see the relationships between statements by looking at the nesting.
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