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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

#91

Post by iLemming »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #40
iLemming wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite experience - been using Clojure for over a decade and it feels like only that mattered for the last five jobs. Even though it's really only just one of many layers that required to do the job. I honestly would love to find a non-clj team and convince them to use it. There are so many useful scripts we write in babaska alone, it just sounds wasteful not to use that path, fully knowing of its existe…

Can you talk more about those scripts, what are you using it for?

Anything that we previously used Bash or Python for - any complex task delegation from GHA; utility scripts for setting up proper ssh tunneling for various k8s clusters; there's pretty complex CLI tool we build for testing our services in ephemeral SDEs running our pods.

Personally: all my MCPs are written in Clojure - https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions; I write small web-scraping scripts and automations in nbb with Playwright. The flexibility of starting the REPL and figuring out the rest of it dynamically, while poking through DOM elements directly from the editor is some blackmagicfuckery that should be outlawed. Imagine being able to control the state of the web browser while typing some incantations in your editor, without much ceremony, without some crazy scaffolding, without "frameworks", without even having to save the code into a file. You gotta be some ignorant fool who doesn't know this was at all possible or a complete idiot to say "meh, but all these parentheses". You gotta be kidding me. It's like if someone gave you a magic car attachment that makes it run for 800 miles on a single charge and you'd say: "meh, I don't like the color of it"...

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

#92

Post by mkw5053 »

chii wrote: post #37
mkw5053 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m no longer in a professional engineering position and have a family and toddler so less time for learning about or playing with program languages. Clojure is what really made me first start thinking about programming languages and down the rabbit hole of scala and Haskell and idris and type theory books. Which are incredible and I can’t recommend more and also not remotely practical.

> also not remotely practical. studying them makes you smarter, which makes you better at using the practical stuff.

Completely agree, I guess I meant if you're writing an application you're going to be a lot less productive using Idris.

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

#93

Post by iLemming »

lsh0 wrote: post #33
iLemming wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know there's a saying in Russian, that roughly translates to: "an expert surgeon is capable of helping a bad dancer", which is on itself is a reference to another idiom: "a bad dancer always blames his own balls". That's quickly becoming befitting for cases like this - so often people rush to blame AI without even trying to use their own reasoning. I don't know what to say, hope you find a good surgeon, because i…

"A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools" might be the western equivalent.

But that's not some lossless transformation - we've forsaken the beautiful poetry, complex relationship between dancers -> balls -> surgeons. I mean, the point was not to bash on bad dancers, no - I am not a bigot. Bad dancers are an important layer of society; they create good economy for surgeons to thrive. They create supplementary jobs - for every surgeon out there, there's a need for assistants, accountants, janitors, etc. A single bad dancer can feed multiple generations of people.

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

#94

Post by embedding-shape »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #40
iLemming wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite experience - been using Clojure for over a decade and it feels like only that mattered for the last five jobs. Even though it's really only just one of many layers that required to do the job. I honestly would love to find a non-clj team and convince them to use it. There are so many useful scripts we write in babaska alone, it just sounds wasteful not to use that path, fully knowing of its existe…

Can you talk more about those scripts, what are you using it for?

Imagine what you'd use random shell scripts, Makefile/Justfile or whatever "scripts" the language offers, if any, but written in Clojure instead, run with Babashka.

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

#95

Post by iLemming »

asa400 wrote: post #74
embedding-shape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

Couldn't agree more. And I actually kind of like Typescript, but man, typical Typescript projects are so verbose and sprawling, it's crazy.

Not to mention that Clojurescript often emit safer code than Typescript does. Sounds insane and counter-intuitive, but here's the thing - Typescript actually removes all the type information from the emitted JS. Clojure, being strongly typed retains the strong typing guarantees in the compiled JS code. So all that enormous amount of effort required to deal with complex types, in practice feels like bringing kata choreography to a street fight - it's not utterly useless by itself, but hardly helping in a real fight-or-flight situation. You can impress the attacker with your beautiful dance and even prevent them from attacking you, but that's more like hope than a real strategy.

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

#97

Post by uxcolumbo »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #90

Clojure is a great language and ecosystem. I donated a little money to Rich's efforts in the early days (I loved his older Common Lisp - Java bridge so his Clojure project was immediately interesting) and I have been paid for a few years of Clojure development. I like maintaining the history in one place, nicely done. I don't use Clojure much anymore, but two hours ago I updated two chapters in my old Clojure book be…

What made you stop using Clojure or not so much anymore? No jobs in Clojure?

Also, in your view, is Clojure better suited for ML / AI apps? And if so, what is stopping it from being more widely adopted. I read the interop with Python ML libraries is good?

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

#98

Post by moomin »

zerr wrote: post #96

Interesting, how many ex-users of Clojure are in the comments. Everyone is praising it, but also everyone moved to something else?

It’s a real statistical outlier, nearly every language people have moved on from gets negative reviews. Me, it was fun but it wasn’t for me and eventually I concluded a number of the fundamental design decisions were wrong.

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

#99

Post by iLemming »

lemming wrote: post #43
adityaathalye wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was more like Emacs got Clojure development niceties early, particularly tight REPL integration. Things have been different for well over five years --- about a third of Clojure's life. There are so many first-class options now. When teaching Clojure, I direct everybody to either VSCode + Calva, or Intellij + Cursive. LSP has really upped the game too. I rebuilt my Emacs development workflow around LSP for…

Things have been different for well over five years... In fact, I first presented Cursive at the conj 2014, and I'd been working on it in open beta for perhaps a year before that, so well over 10 years! ...all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo. ahem

Thank you Colin for the outstanding work and selfless, continuous gifting and self-generosity. Cursive remains one of the important pillars of Clojure journey for many beginners and seasoned pros.

You just can't ignore the amazing collaboration and camaraderie between Clojure tools builders. - you Colin, Peter (Calva), Eric (clojure-lsp), Michiel (babashka, kondo, etc.), Bozhidar (CIDER, clojure-mode), Juan (flowstorm), Chris (Portal), and many others.

Everyone, instead of competing with one another just wants for people to find their best way of using Clojure, and that is really awesome. You can see the ideas freely circulating between spaces and creating great of awesomeness for everyone in the community. I'm telling you all this as someone who doesn't even use Cursive. I still can see your work. I can tell how valuable, important and vital you are for me personally and for many of my friends and colleagues. I salute you, and every other tool-making hero. Thank you, guys!

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

#100

Post by andersmurphy »

bachmeier wrote: post #76

I've always enjoyed using Clojure. Unfortunately, most of the things I do require interacting with the C world, so it has never been a real option as my primary language.

Coffi [1] built on java 22 (project panama) C FFI. Makes binding to C from Clojure a lot of fun.

- [1] https://github.com/IGJoshua/coffi

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