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That survey is unrepresentative for scripting, since it's a survey of all Clojure applications. Scripting tends to be one-off, custom high level logic. I'm sure
by zurn 9y ago
That survey is unrepresentative for scripting, since it's a survey of all Clojure applications. Scripting tends to be one-off, custom high level logic. I'm sure any Clojure user will tell you that short programs start fast enough for scripting - and for development, you are live-reloading in the REPL with 0 startup time.
About deployment and distribution, I think the JVM story is much better than the competition (Python, Node, etc) - you can just package everything in a single .jar and you need only this along with the JVM.
Embedded systems, like I wrote above, are hardly restricted to this kind of tiny chip. Embedded systems these days are frequently powerful enough to run Clojure. There's a big market for developing embedded solutions that value memory-safety, fast turnaround times and on-devices development ability along with access to JVM libs.
To summarize, I still disagree that all these broad sectors would be weak for Clojure (like you argued in your original post). There are be smaller niches inside these sectors that Clojure is not well suited to (like operating systems, or low-powered embedded, or frequently executed end-user scripts that need sub-second startup times, or code inside operating system kernels) but this hardly excludes Clojure for all your listed broad application areas.
- didibus 9y agoI haven't worked those sectors personally, so I'm not going to pretend I know fully their requirements and if Clojure would be a smart choice. But from what I've heard and read, embedded systems is dominated by C. Very little chips support embedded java from my googling about it. Serious work still needs compact binaries, and to maximise the chips output. The exceptions are critical use cases, where they might use java and have a TLS proof with it which I don't think would work if using Clojure, or they'll go with Haskell or Agda, because they need to guarantee there's no bugs. Now I say this only from searching online and people I know who work in embedded systems. Is there a sector for scripting? I was thinking of IT mostly, sys admin, that kind of stuff. In those cases, configuring java and clojure and inlein feel pretty heavy to me. I've never seen it in practice. It always adopts a language that is bundled with the OS like sh, perl, python, powershell, batch, etc. It seems to me like the niche in these sectors would be Clojure being the right language. But I don't have real stats, so you might be 100% right. Personally, I didn't feel it is, I can think of more examples of use cases where bash is a better choice for scripting, or more examples where C is a better choice for embedded. If you work in those sectors you probably know better, but I didn't get the impression you did, so I guess neither of us really knows.