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I always enjoy Rich's and Cognitect's increasingly futile attempts to bait and switch the Clojure community into using his expensive proprietary database, Datom

I always enjoy Rich's and Cognitect's increasingly futile attempts to bait and switch the Clojure community into using his expensive proprietary database, Datomic. I love Clojure, it's a beautiful language, but its march has stalled, perhaps even reversed, and I lay the blame of that squarely at the anti-community practices of Cognitect, especially surrounding Datomic.

keymone 9y ago
is anybody forcing you to use datomic? no. is cognitect doing something to clojure that is beneficial exclusively for datomic? no. has cognitect banned you from making pull requests that improve clojure? no. has cognitect banned you from forking clojure and fixing whatever you think they've done with some evil intent? no. so wtf are you on about?
- whalesalad 9y ago
  AFAIK clojure doesn’t accept pull requests.
  - keymone 9y ago
    "send a patch" sounds so 90s, but you're right.
- geofft 9y ago
  > has cognitect banned you from forking clojure and fixing whatever you think they've done with some evil intent? no. I don't understand this objection. The value in a free software project, and especially of a programming language, is primarily in its community and the expectation of a future around the project, not in the existence of some code somewhere. It's extraordinarily hard to build a community around a fork, and if you need to fork to do reasonable things, that's a legitimate criticism of the people running the original community. (That said, if you only need to fork to do unreasonable things, that's good community management. I don't pay nearly enough attention to Clojure to know what's actually happening - but I have seen both of these cases in other free software communities.)
  - keymone 9y ago
    > It's extraordinarily hard to build a community around a fork it follows quite naturally, that reasoning to fork doesn't have enough community support, which only means one thing - you're wrong about clojure community's opinion on state of things around clojure.
    - krisdol 9y ago
      Adding to that, there are a few forks of popular projects that were quite successful: io.js, libreoffice, mariadb.
      - evilduck 9y ago
        Blink, Ubuntu, neovim, LibreSSL, Plex, XOrg, etc, etc. If you're dedicated to it and correct about your choices, forking doesn't seem to hamper anything.
    - geofft 9y ago
      I'd believe that if it were ordinarily hard to fork. But it's disproportionately hard to fork because of network effects. It's true that if the community approves of the current direction, a fork won't succeed. But that doesn't mean that if a fork doesn't succeed, it implies the community approves.
  - DigitalJack 9y ago
    "It's extraordinarily hard to build a community around a fork" This may sound snarky, but I mean it earnestly: It's extraordinarily hard to build a community. Period.
Sinidir 9y ago
You mean that they want to make some money?
- vog 9y ago
  Do you imply that in general, the (perfectly valid) desire to make money would have justified bad behaviour towards a community? In general, if you have a community around your comany, you can do it properly, or you can do it Oracle style. (pushing MySQL, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, etc. into forks or death). So the question is only whether Cognitect is good or bad for the community, not whether they make money or not. Making money is not a good excuse of bad behaviour. And while we are at it, doing voluntary work isn't a good excuse for bad behaviour, either, but that's another topic. Having said that, I don't see where Cognitect is bad for the community. Rather, they seem to interact very well with the community.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sooheon 9y ago
    > Do you imply that in general, the (perfectly valid) desire to make money would have justified bad behaviour towards a community? But the OP made insinuations that the act of selling software was de facto negative to the community. It is only necessary to point out that making money is not automatically harmful to the community.
pjmlp 9y ago
People that give you programming languages for free need to pay their bills in some way.
- cutler 9y ago
  It could be argued they'd make more money from consulting with a much wider adoption of free Datomic. The problem in the Clojure community is much wider - it's not interested in wider adoption, competing for mindshare and rallying round a web framework to attract new users. I think it's partly a Lisp thing.
iLemming 9y ago
> its march has stalled Clojure being a Lisp probably exceeded and overachieved its goals when it comes to popularity. Sadly, not a single Lisp probably will ever become a mainstream. And for the same reasons why Vim and Emacs would never become more popular than IntelliJ and Sublime. People tend to choose something easy to start with, out of the box thing, not something that has a small, simple core yet extremely extensible and rich ecosystem. Most of the innovation in Clojure-space happening outside of Cognitect, driven mostly by individuals. Look at Clojurescript. It hasn't stalled, au contraire - with every release it's getting better. Pick any large Clojurescript project - PrecursorApp or Circle CI, look under the hood. Compare Re-frame and Fulcro projects with other popular Javascript frameworks. Check out Re-Natal, Lumo and Planck. Right now Clojurescript probably the most pragmatic choice if you want to build web-apps using a functional language. GHCJS and Purescript (that appeared few years before Clojurescript) - still hasn't quite reached popularity. Elm - which is 5 years old (same as Clojurescript) - still feels a bit experimental. ScalaJS - I don't even want to talk about Scala. Fable/FunScript/WebSharper? Microsoft has failed to convince even its own herd to start using F#. Largely - C# still in use. And those guys prefer Typescript - not really functional. Only ReasonML someday soon may become true competitor to Clojurescript simply because: a) Facebook behind it; b) ain't a Lisp.

keymone 9y ago

is anybody forcing you to use datomic? no. is cognitect doing something to clojure that is beneficial exclusively for datomic? no. has cognitect banned you from making pull requests that improve clojure? no. has cognitect banned you from forking clojure and fixing whatever you think they've done with some evil intent? no. so wtf are you on about?

whalesalad 9y ago
AFAIK clojure doesn’t accept pull requests.
- keymone 9y ago
  "send a patch" sounds so 90s, but you're right.
geofft 9y ago
> has cognitect banned you from forking clojure and fixing whatever you think they've done with some evil intent? no. I don't understand this objection. The value in a free software project, and especially of a programming language, is primarily in its community and the expectation of a future around the project, not in the existence of some code somewhere. It's extraordinarily hard to build a community around a fork, and if you need to fork to do reasonable things, that's a legitimate criticism of the people running the original community. (That said, if you only need to fork to do unreasonable things, that's good community management. I don't pay nearly enough attention to Clojure to know what's actually happening - but I have seen both of these cases in other free software communities.)
- keymone 9y ago
  > It's extraordinarily hard to build a community around a fork it follows quite naturally, that reasoning to fork doesn't have enough community support, which only means one thing - you're wrong about clojure community's opinion on state of things around clojure.
  - krisdol 9y ago
    Adding to that, there are a few forks of popular projects that were quite successful: io.js, libreoffice, mariadb.
    - evilduck 9y ago
      Blink, Ubuntu, neovim, LibreSSL, Plex, XOrg, etc, etc. If you're dedicated to it and correct about your choices, forking doesn't seem to hamper anything.
  - geofft 9y ago
    I'd believe that if it were ordinarily hard to fork. But it's disproportionately hard to fork because of network effects. It's true that if the community approves of the current direction, a fork won't succeed. But that doesn't mean that if a fork doesn't succeed, it implies the community approves.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  "It's extraordinarily hard to build a community around a fork" This may sound snarky, but I mean it earnestly: It's extraordinarily hard to build a community. Period.

Sinidir 9y ago

You mean that they want to make some money?

vog 9y ago
Do you imply that in general, the (perfectly valid) desire to make money would have justified bad behaviour towards a community? In general, if you have a community around your comany, you can do it properly, or you can do it Oracle style. (pushing MySQL, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, etc. into forks or death). So the question is only whether Cognitect is good or bad for the community, not whether they make money or not. Making money is not a good excuse of bad behaviour. And while we are at it, doing voluntary work isn't a good excuse for bad behaviour, either, but that's another topic. Having said that, I don't see where Cognitect is bad for the community. Rather, they seem to interact very well with the community.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sooheon 9y ago
  > Do you imply that in general, the (perfectly valid) desire to make money would have justified bad behaviour towards a community? But the OP made insinuations that the act of selling software was de facto negative to the community. It is only necessary to point out that making money is not automatically harmful to the community.

pjmlp 9y ago

People that give you programming languages for free need to pay their bills in some way.

cutler 9y ago
It could be argued they'd make more money from consulting with a much wider adoption of free Datomic. The problem in the Clojure community is much wider - it's not interested in wider adoption, competing for mindshare and rallying round a web framework to attract new users. I think it's partly a Lisp thing.

iLemming 9y ago

> its march has stalled Clojure being a Lisp probably exceeded and overachieved its goals when it comes to popularity. Sadly, not a single Lisp probably will ever become a mainstream. And for the same reasons why Vim and Emacs would never become more popular than IntelliJ and Sublime. People tend to choose something easy to start with, out of the box thing, not something that has a small, simple core yet extremely extensible and rich ecosystem. Most of the innovation in Clojure-space happening outside of Cognitect, driven mostly by individuals. Look at Clojurescript. It hasn't stalled, au contraire - with every release it's getting better. Pick any large Clojurescript project - PrecursorApp or Circle CI, look under the hood. Compare Re-frame and Fulcro projects with other popular Javascript frameworks. Check out Re-Natal, Lumo and Planck. Right now Clojurescript probably the most pragmatic choice if you want to build web-apps using a functional language. GHCJS and Purescript (that appeared few years before Clojurescript) - still hasn't quite reached popularity. Elm - which is 5 years old (same as Clojurescript) - still feels a bit experimental. ScalaJS - I don't even want to talk about Scala. Fable/FunScript/WebSharper? Microsoft has failed to convince even its own herd to start using F#. Largely - C# still in use. And those guys prefer Typescript - not really functional. Only ReasonML someday soon may become true competitor to Clojurescript simply because: a) Facebook behind it; b) ain't a Lisp.