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PHP has a massive following. It was basically the only language for the web 1-2 decades ago, everything had to be written in PHP. Of course, it cannot be exting

PHP has a massive following. It was basically the only language for the web 1-2 decades ago, everything had to be written in PHP. Of course, it cannot be extinguished since the existing sites will drag on forever. Clojure never had much usage on real world projects. It cannot be extinguishes as it never took of.

hellofunk 9y ago
> It cannot be extinguishes as it never took of. I'm not sure what you mean by "never took off" but thousands of developers around the world, myself included, have made their living just writing Clojure code for many years. So, it has certainly taken off for them. And there are many, many companies using it all over the world. I live in a town of about half a million people, so not super big, and there are about 12 companies primarily operating on a Clojure codebase.
- cutler 9y ago
  I'm genuinely intrigued. Which town is that?
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    A lovely place in Western Europe.
- user5994461 9y ago
  A drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of thousands of developers who make a living in PHP, C, java or python. You know, the major languages.
yogthos 9y ago
Tell that to Amazon, Apple, Boeing, and Walmart. Just a few big companies using Clojure today.
- darksaints 9y ago
  I don’t know about the others, but the Amazon claim is basically useless. It’s like claiming “As seen on NBC” when it was a Sunday 4am mention on a Sioux City affiliate. Maybe one in 500 teams (optimistically!) uses Clojure. Many of the Clojure code bases I saw while there were either deprecated or were functionally zombie services. Amazon also uses Fortran, Assembly, Awk, Mosel, VBA, K, and Bash, but nobody is going around claiming they have much usage on real world projects.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    I agree with you that it's not necessary or meaningful to "name drop" companies that use some X technology as an indication of its worth. Languages and tools don't need a massive following by enterprise to be incredible and revolutionary. It's like a really good movie that didn't have a large audience but was nonetheless really awesome for those who did see it. That's a lot like how I think Clojure is.
  - yogthos 9y ago
    Amazon was specifically using Clojure for the online checkout system, and the team bragged a few years ago how the system survived black friday without a hickup. Walmart is using Clojure for their checkouts as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av9Xi6CNqq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av9Xi6CNqq4 Boeing is using it in the onboard control systems for the 737 Max https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUC7noGU1mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUC7noGU1mQ It's not some obscure microservice that some intern wrote over the weekend, these companies are using the language for critical applications, and the feedback from these companies is positive.
    - darksaints 9y ago
      The online checkout system isn’t a single service. I personally worked with the Delivery Promise service for a short time, and that service was composed of 8 different services...and that was just to calculate when we promised arrival to the customer during checkout. As in, they were just a single component of hundreds called during checkout. At the very least, none of those 9 services used Clojure. If anybody led you to believe that their team did “online checkout”, but didn’t care to explain how small of a cog they were in an extremely complex system composed of hundreds of services, then you were grossly misled.
cutler 9y ago
PHP, while very popular, has never been the only language for the web. A decade ago it was competing with Ruby on Rails, Django and Java. Two decades ago Perl was the dominant web development language.

hellofunk 9y ago

> It cannot be extinguishes as it never took of. I'm not sure what you mean by "never took off" but thousands of developers around the world, myself included, have made their living just writing Clojure code for many years. So, it has certainly taken off for them. And there are many, many companies using it all over the world. I live in a town of about half a million people, so not super big, and there are about 12 companies primarily operating on a Clojure codebase.

cutler 9y ago
I'm genuinely intrigued. Which town is that?
- hellofunk 9y ago
  A lovely place in Western Europe.
user5994461 9y ago
A drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of thousands of developers who make a living in PHP, C, java or python. You know, the major languages.

yogthos 9y ago

Tell that to Amazon, Apple, Boeing, and Walmart. Just a few big companies using Clojure today.

darksaints 9y ago
I don’t know about the others, but the Amazon claim is basically useless. It’s like claiming “As seen on NBC” when it was a Sunday 4am mention on a Sioux City affiliate. Maybe one in 500 teams (optimistically!) uses Clojure. Many of the Clojure code bases I saw while there were either deprecated or were functionally zombie services. Amazon also uses Fortran, Assembly, Awk, Mosel, VBA, K, and Bash, but nobody is going around claiming they have much usage on real world projects.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  I agree with you that it's not necessary or meaningful to "name drop" companies that use some X technology as an indication of its worth. Languages and tools don't need a massive following by enterprise to be incredible and revolutionary. It's like a really good movie that didn't have a large audience but was nonetheless really awesome for those who did see it. That's a lot like how I think Clojure is.
- yogthos 9y ago
  Amazon was specifically using Clojure for the online checkout system, and the team bragged a few years ago how the system survived black friday without a hickup. Walmart is using Clojure for their checkouts as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av9Xi6CNqq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av9Xi6CNqq4 Boeing is using it in the onboard control systems for the 737 Max https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUC7noGU1mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUC7noGU1mQ It's not some obscure microservice that some intern wrote over the weekend, these companies are using the language for critical applications, and the feedback from these companies is positive.
  - darksaints 9y ago
    The online checkout system isn’t a single service. I personally worked with the Delivery Promise service for a short time, and that service was composed of 8 different services...and that was just to calculate when we promised arrival to the customer during checkout. As in, they were just a single component of hundreds called during checkout. At the very least, none of those 9 services used Clojure. If anybody led you to believe that their team did “online checkout”, but didn’t care to explain how small of a cog they were in an extremely complex system composed of hundreds of services, then you were grossly misled.

cutler 9y ago

PHP, while very popular, has never been the only language for the web. A decade ago it was competing with Ruby on Rails, Django and Java. Two decades ago Perl was the dominant web development language.