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>Really, I'd love to come back to Clojure but the problems I run into in my day job often have me thinking, "types would have made this so much easier." I've g

>Really, I'd love to come back to Clojure but the problems I run into in my day job often have me thinking, "types would have made this so much easier." I've gone back and forth on this one during the course of my career. My first professional language was Borland Delphi (strongly typed), then C (weakly typed), then Perl (dynamic), then Java (mostly strongly typed), Scala (very strongly typed) and now I'm slowly trying to adopt Clojure at my place of work. Out of all those the worst kind of code I've ever come across was in Perl, so for awhile I've blamed the lack of typing as a contributing factor to this. However. Most of the Python code I've seen since around 2001 has been fairly clean looking so that can't just be dynamic typing that was to blame. I suspect Perl's woes had more to do with the "there is more than one way to do it philosophy" as opposed to types. There's just no such thing as idiomatic Perl. In fact I'm seeing some of this in some Scala code. There are nearly-religious level wars around what constitutes idiomatic Scala way of doing things. I've seen completely insane spaghetti-style Scala classes, especially those that dealt with XML code and DSLs. So far, it seems that Clojure in Java ecosystem is more like Python than like Perl. I.e. only one way of doing things that is fairly clear from the onset.

muraiki 11y ago
Thanks for your response. Most of my professional work is in Perl, except for frontend stuff in JS, although we are increasingly using Go for more things. I'm lucky in that our Perl codebase is very well structured and clean, despite having parts up to 20 years old. It relies very little on objects, generally passing around hashes of information. For error handling we even use something akin to the Either type, instead of using exceptions. But yeah, you could go into another Perl codebase and see a completely different story. I guess that I really lucked out! Anyway, when I walked into this Perl codebase I generally didn't feel too far away from Clojure in terms of its basic setup, creating lots of small functions that accept and produce basic data structures. But where I do feel pain is in safely refactoring that code, getting insight into where things are used, and understanding what might happen to be in this plain old hash being passed around. It's at this point that I miss having good tooling, in the sense of the tooling I've experienced in Go or Scala. The only dynamic language I've used with comparable tooling is Smalltalk, but unfortunately that's not really viable professionally at this time. :( I've heard good things about Cursive Clojure, so perhaps I should give it a try and see what fancy features it has.

muraiki 11y ago

Thanks for your response. Most of my professional work is in Perl, except for frontend stuff in JS, although we are increasingly using Go for more things. I'm lucky in that our Perl codebase is very well structured and clean, despite having parts up to 20 years old. It relies very little on objects, generally passing around hashes of information. For error handling we even use something akin to the Either type, instead of using exceptions. But yeah, you could go into another Perl codebase and see a completely different story. I guess that I really lucked out! Anyway, when I walked into this Perl codebase I generally didn't feel too far away from Clojure in terms of its basic setup, creating lots of small functions that accept and produce basic data structures. But where I do feel pain is in safely refactoring that code, getting insight into where things are used, and understanding what might happen to be in this plain old hash being passed around. It's at this point that I miss having good tooling, in the sense of the tooling I've experienced in Go or Scala. The only dynamic language I've used with comparable tooling is Smalltalk, but unfortunately that's not really viable professionally at this time. :( I've heard good things about Cursive Clojure, so perhaps I should give it a try and see what fancy features it has.