Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
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Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
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Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#2One thing he said I absolutely agree with - when you're in a crunch situation, either in a startup or a new high-pressure project at BigCo, you don't pick a tool set with which you're not familiar. Even if it looks very nice. You're going to have enough frustration making deadlines without the additional hassle of discovering the warts (and they're always there) of a new language.
Where I work there are always projects that are a little bit under management radar - things that need to be done but don't need to be done in a big hurry. That's the right kind of project to scratch your chin and say "You know, I've never written anything in whitespace."
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#3Dreaming up new analogous phrasings to easy != simple now.
Fun > easy > simple?
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#4My fav is Hard is easy, easy is hard.
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#5Revenge of the averages
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#6His experience matches most of mine:
I've been learning & trying to use clojure(script) for ~2 years now. A few things I miss in every other languages:
- The REPL: I usually don't need a debugger,
- Figwheel: that makes frontend dev a pleasure,
- reagent/reframe: are incredibly straightforward, there's no special syntax, no special constructs, just a few functions, a few concepts (dispatch / subscribed) and you're done,
- core.async: based on a simple channels / pipeline paradigm
But then you get into the practicalities of testing & writing code. Shady special cases[1][2], annoying testing tools[3], useless stack traces. And other issues everybody knows. Simple things that become a 30 min discussion with 3 different libraries and 2 blog articles to go through[4].
To me, there's this hardcore group of clojur'ist that seems to be hyper productive and keep introducing new concepts. And the "rest" (me at least), that are floundering. You fight with useless stacktraces? Boom, transducers. You deal with buggy test runners? Bam, a new specification library with test generations.
I've started moving my code to ES6 and Go. The community is filled with helpful people, but it seems to me that if you're not writing Clojure professionally already, the language is becoming less and less relevant.
[1] https://github.com/replikativ/superv.async/issues/2#issuecom...
[2] https://clojurians-log.clojureverse.org/clojurescript/2017-0...
[3] https://github.com/bensu/doo/issues/134
[4] https://clojurians-log.clojureverse.org/clojurescript/2017-0...
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#7My fav is Hard is easy, easy is hard.
You mean complex is easy, simple is hard?
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#8His experience matches most of mine: I've been learning & trying to use clojure(script) for ~2 years now. A few things I miss in every other languages: - The REPL: I usually don't need a debugger, - Figwheel: that makes frontend dev a pleasure, - reagent/reframe: are incredibly straightforward, there's no special syntax, no special constructs, just a few functions, a few concepts (dispatch / subscribed) and you're do…
The examples you raised are all - I believe not by coincidence - related to how Clojure interact with the host platform (both Java and Javascript). It simply doesn't shield you from it. As a consequence tracebacks bubble up, and you're expected to know how to debug it, and hopefully use the debugger of the host platform. This is aggravated on JS since JS exceptions mean nothing most of the time.
clojure.spec (launching on 1.9) will allow better error reporting on some cases, but the philosophy of the language has always being about giving you a lot of power vs. shielding you from complexity.
Also, a lot of people being introduced to Clojure from a Ruby background (and others, ofc) are having to learn simultaneously about: functional programming, Lisp, immutable data structures, the internals of JS/JVM, advanced concepts like STM, CSP, and a whole host of new libraries. That is a steep learning hill, specially if one bought the argument that programmers are snowflakes who can't take frustration. Once you're on the other side though, the complex, messy real-world projects become more amenable, because Clojure was created thinking about those. That's what Rich meant by "Simple ain't easy".
IMHO, working at a company w/ a codebase of ~150 projects written in Clojure, the productivity has paid off w/ interest though.
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#9His experience matches most of mine: I've been learning & trying to use clojure(script) for ~2 years now. A few things I miss in every other languages: - The REPL: I usually don't need a debugger, - Figwheel: that makes frontend dev a pleasure, - reagent/reframe: are incredibly straightforward, there's no special syntax, no special constructs, just a few functions, a few concepts (dispatch / subscribed) and you're do…
The problems you listed are about ClojureScript. I agree the ergonomics are still behind JVM Clojure, but then again the competition is significantly worse too in the JS space.
And if you end up concluding some other front-end language is better, Clojure is still a really good choice for the back end.
Re: Simple Ain't Easy, but Hard Ain't Simple: Leaving Clojure for Ruby
#10His experience matches most of mine: I've been learning & trying to use clojure(script) for ~2 years now. A few things I miss in every other languages: - The REPL: I usually don't need a debugger, - Figwheel: that makes frontend dev a pleasure, - reagent/reframe: are incredibly straightforward, there's no special syntax, no special constructs, just a few functions, a few concepts (dispatch / subscribed) and you're do…
The examples you raised are all - I believe not by coincidence - related to how Clojure interact with the host platform (both Java and Javascript). It simply doesn't shield you from it. As a consequence tracebacks bubble up, and you're expected to know how to debug it, and hopefully use the debugger of the host platform. This is aggravated on JS since JS exceptions mean nothing most of the time. clojure.spec (launchi…
> specially if one bought the argument that programmers are snowflakes who can't take frustration.
I think that characterising a (clearly knowledgeable, well-referenced) account of frustrations - especially ones that do not occur in other languages - with the dismissive term "snowflake" is exactly where the stereotype of the "smug Lisp weenie" comes from.
I have used and loved Clojure for years now (I wrote the patch that made Clojure vectors implement java.util.List, back in the pre-1.0 days). The fact that these problems exist doesn't itself give me existential worries about the future of the language. The fact that almost every Twitter thread in the OP, and the parent comment, contained this sort of dismissive reaction makes me very worried indeed.
If we replicate the community of Common Lisp, we will end up replicating its level of industry adoption.