13 ms·

Okay, here's my take on the implicit narrative here: Clojure is done. It will continue to improve, people will continue to use it and build cool things with it,

by moomin 8y ago

Okay, here's my take on the implicit narrative here: Clojure is done. It will continue to improve, people will continue to use it and build cool things with it, but maintainers are burnt out, mostly because there aren't enough of them and partly because of the passive-aggressive relationship Cognitect has with the community. There's a whole bunch of languages with small dedicated communities doing interesting stuff. D and Julia occur to me off the top of my head. It's not "failure" that Clojure doesn't really challenge Kotlin or Scala for mindshare. It's nonetheless disappointing for people like me who used to be really excited by Clojure's potential. Could it have been different? I don't know. The powers that be could definitely have been more committed to growing the base, but it never seems to have interested them. Would it have made a difference? I honestly don't know.

Scarbutt 8y ago
Curious, can see for it for Julia but what interesting stuff is D doing?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Being a systems programming language with a GC, following the footsteps of Algol68 RS, Mesa/Cedar, Oberon, Oberon-2, Component Pascal, Active Oberon, Sing#, M#,... Coupled with powerful meta-programming capabilities, while having quite fast compilation times. They just suffer from being a tiny community, so everything kind of improves slowly.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    And Go and Rust stealing their thunder in terms of mind share.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      While on the other extreme, Java and .NET keep improving their tooling and features for AOT compilation and low level programming, with OS platforms to go along. It is not easy to find that sweet spot that makes a language take off. Ruby was unknown for almost a decade until Rails came along, for example.
dunefox 8y ago
Be careful, Clojure people might call you entitled and let you know that Cognitect/Rich Hickey is developing Clojure after their own needs, not yours.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  What your need that is not addressed by Clojure because it is developed after Rich’s needs?
norswap 8y ago
I don't see how that's implicit in the article at all. Also, I don't see why we need to keep pitting languages against one another like this. Sure, there is a market, but can't we be happy that there is a diverse offering pushing language design forward? Not every language needs to become Java in terms of adoption.
- jecxjo 8y ago
  In my last job I had two realms of development. The first was strictly based on what the company had been doing for years, what we expect new hires to know and what we touted as our language of choice. Embedded world that was C. The second realm was languages that I picked purely because they filled a niche better than anything else. Often these were side projects, or tooling, or things that I could sell based on how quickly and efficiently I could get up and running with X language that would save us money even if we eventually had to replace it if no one learned it. I used F# for big data processing because I am an FP guy and they wanted .Net and I could do data manipulation like nobody's business. I used tcl/tk because I needed a super quick and dirty UI for tooling that I could quickly update to add new features. I used Racket when meta programming would hugely benefit me. The problem is that for a lot of our jobs we are stuck with realm 1, the things we can't change. This is the area where we end up pitting languages against each other because they end up used way more than realm 2. You have to push really hard and hope someone listens but more often than not you just keep on doing what you're doing. I worked on a huge JVM based project and even though no one in the company knew Java there was just no selling upper management on using Clojure. FP would have reduced complexity, meta programming and dynamic code generation would have made it much more robust without a lot of effort, but it was just too foreign (or at least not advertised as being used in places well enough), too new, and when you Googled it the "major" issues developers had scared everyone.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    What major issues?
  - hnzix 8y ago
    > I worked on a huge JVM based project and even though no one in the company knew Java there was just no selling upper management on using Clojure. Just tell management you're using a Java library called Clojure, they'll never know the difference ;)
puredanger 8y ago
This sentiment is in direct conflict with all of the data in the survey, which shows increasing use and importance of that use. I know of more than one company that has bet big on Clojure in the last year and is succeeding where they have failed with other stacks at business-changing levels. I know of companies with 100s of Clojure devs. Download stats continue to trend up. Etc. The core team is rocking right now and feel like we are on the tail of lifting spec to the next level (and out of alpha), and interested in finding ways to work better with the community. Some many great ideas in the hopper for REBL and other things too. 2019 is going to be a great year for Clojure.
- cutler 8y ago
  Download stats mean nothing. The truth about Clojure adoption can be found by typing "title:Clojure" into Indeed.com. Search for United Kingdom and you'll find 4 Clojure jobs, 3 of which are in London.
  - kingofhdds 8y ago
    Using "title:" you meaninglessly narrowed your search. There are postings like "Software engineer" with body saying "Developing with JS, and Clojure" which won't appear in your results. Number of "Clojure" results is 109, compared with 98 for "Haskell", for instance (in London, according to indeed.co.uk). So both are not scoring big, certainly, but those numbers are nevertheless better than 3-4 years ago.
    - marxama 8y ago
      In my experience (in Sweden), most of those results are "false positives". Companies/recruiters like to look for passionate programmers, so they put smaller languages like Clojure in their ads, even though the job itself has nothing to do with it.
      - kingofhdds 8y ago
        True, except they don't include languages just for being smaller (we don't see Befunge, or Unlambda there), but those associated with smartness, and passion for learning. In context of the discussion (dead/alive state), I wouldn't count this as a bad thing. There's no arguing that finding FP job is hundreds (or thousands, depending on city/country) times harder than OOP job. It doesn't mean all functional langs are dead.
nepeckman 8y ago
I'll offer a different take: Clojure is settled. It found its niche: a small/medium group of experienced professionals who like its practicality and power. There's a comment somewhere else in this section that Clojure devs are more experienced on average than JVM devs. I'd like to add another stat from the State of JS survey[0] that went out a while back. Developers who used ClojureScript had the highest salaries and most years of experience when compared to other compile-to-js languages. This narrative makes intuitive sense to me. Clojure is not the most beginner friendly language. It goes harder on functional programming concepts than the popular scripting languages, which is a bit of a learning curve. The cultural tendency to prefer smaller scoped libraries to broader frameworks means puts more cognitive load on the developer, who has to decide which libraries to use and how to wire them up. But this is a positive attribute for a more experienced developer, who might have strong opinions on how an application should be structured. [0] https://2018.stateofjs.com/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/
- pr0tonic 8y ago
  Clojure is not the most beginner friendly language. I really disagree here. My first job out of college was at a Clojure shop and it has been the easiest language I've ever learned. There is a small hurdle of switching to lisp syntax when all you've ever used is C style languages, but that's about it. I also find frameworks more effort to learn than pulling in a small library that does the one thing I need.
  - nepeckman 8y ago
    I can really only speak from my personal experience here. I learned Clojure on my own time in college, and it took some time for me to understand how to deal with things like immutability, laziness, and pure functions. After I did finally 'get' it, I was unable to convince any of my classmates that the initial effort was worth it. I love the language and its opinions, but JavaScript (another language I learned on my own time) was probably 10x easier.
    - jimbokun 8y ago
      "I learned Clojure on my own time in college, and it took some time for me to understand how to deal with things like immutability, laziness, and pure functions." I suspect much of that time was spent "unlearning" habits from procedural languages. I know Carnegie Mellon now teaches functional programming as the introductory course, and only introduces advanced topics like "mutability" later. I think that sequence makes it easier for beginners to reason about what their program is going to do and experience less frustration.
hota_mazi 8y ago
The trend of programming languages is to move toward static typing. Not as an afterthought, with gradual typing or retrofitted years later into an unwilling compiler, but languages designed from day one with static typing, parametric polymorphism, and type inference. Clojure's life time was limited from day one because it's simply going against the trend.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Because python or Javascript aren't a thing?
  - purple_ducks 8y ago
    Given the huge uptake on Typescript, I don't think using JS as an example makes sense. Static typing helps. It doesn't have to be Java-esque. F# & friends have really nice static type systems where you don't need to declare types for most things - they're automatically inferred.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      Seems like javascript is destined to be here for the long haul despite the presence of typescript. In fact static type proponents have been predicting the death of dynamic type languages since this gulf became apparent. Thus far reports of one camps deaths have been greatly exaggerated by the other.
      - munificent 8y ago
        No one is arguing that dynamically typed languages are all going to die out (though CoffeeScript and Perl certainly aren't doing well). Languages almost never die. People are still writing COBOL. But the relative share of programmers writing code in statically typed languages appears to be increasing. When the web got big, there was a very rapid growth in dynamically typed scripting languages: Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Then, when client side web development became a thing, JS got huge and then CoffeeScript. In the past decade or so as developers have moved to writing larger more performance-intensive client-side applications (read: mobile with touch UIs running at 60 FPS), there is now a turn back towards static typing: TypeScript, Kotlin, Swift, etc. Also, the sophistication of static type systems is increasing. Generics are now a given, control over variance is increasingly common, as is static control over null references. This doesn't mean the graph will go towards static types forever, but it certainly appears to be right now.
ilikehurdles 8y ago
There are literally 10-100 times more clojure jobs in every market I’ve searched than Julia or D jobs. The ecosystem continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and third party developer tooling and integrations keep expanding. HN has been bullish on D for at least 10 years going and yet all the _new_ systems programming roles in my city are C++ and a bit of Rust.
- cutler 8y ago
  "title:Clojure"/United Kingdom at Indeed.co.uk produces 4 Clojure jobs. Go figure.
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    I’ve been a software engineer and a backend engineer but I’ve bever been a “clojure engineer”. Why needlessly require the language in the title? Any reference to it anywhere in the body is unambiguously referring to the same programming language. Anyway, using LinkedIn, roughly 70 results in Boston, 30 in Denver, 130 in San Francisco. 867 across the US. I worked for three years with clojure and just chose between two new job offers after a short search, also in clojure. I’m seeing the language get use in microservices in larger, more established orgs that may already have a jvm docker image that their devops supports.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Alternatively you could just not badly interpret gossip and turn it into unfounded broad pronouncements. You are the guy who manages to turn the rumor that Clarice in accounting is home sick with a cold into Clarice is dying of cancer.
draw_down 8y ago
Implicit narrative?

by moomin 8y ago

Scarbutt 8y ago

Curious, can see for it for Julia but what interesting stuff is D doing?

pjmlp 8y ago
Being a systems programming language with a GC, following the footsteps of Algol68 RS, Mesa/Cedar, Oberon, Oberon-2, Component Pascal, Active Oberon, Sing#, M#,... Coupled with powerful meta-programming capabilities, while having quite fast compilation times. They just suffer from being a tiny community, so everything kind of improves slowly.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  And Go and Rust stealing their thunder in terms of mind share.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    While on the other extreme, Java and .NET keep improving their tooling and features for AOT compilation and low level programming, with OS platforms to go along. It is not easy to find that sweet spot that makes a language take off. Ruby was unknown for almost a decade until Rails came along, for example.

dunefox 8y ago

Be careful, Clojure people might call you entitled and let you know that Cognitect/Rich Hickey is developing Clojure after their own needs, not yours.

StreamBright 8y ago
What your need that is not addressed by Clojure because it is developed after Rich’s needs?

norswap 8y ago

I don't see how that's implicit in the article at all. Also, I don't see why we need to keep pitting languages against one another like this. Sure, there is a market, but can't we be happy that there is a diverse offering pushing language design forward? Not every language needs to become Java in terms of adoption.

jecxjo 8y ago
In my last job I had two realms of development. The first was strictly based on what the company had been doing for years, what we expect new hires to know and what we touted as our language of choice. Embedded world that was C. The second realm was languages that I picked purely because they filled a niche better than anything else. Often these were side projects, or tooling, or things that I could sell based on how quickly and efficiently I could get up and running with X language that would save us money even if we eventually had to replace it if no one learned it. I used F# for big data processing because I am an FP guy and they wanted .Net and I could do data manipulation like nobody's business. I used tcl/tk because I needed a super quick and dirty UI for tooling that I could quickly update to add new features. I used Racket when meta programming would hugely benefit me. The problem is that for a lot of our jobs we are stuck with realm 1, the things we can't change. This is the area where we end up pitting languages against each other because they end up used way more than realm 2. You have to push really hard and hope someone listens but more often than not you just keep on doing what you're doing. I worked on a huge JVM based project and even though no one in the company knew Java there was just no selling upper management on using Clojure. FP would have reduced complexity, meta programming and dynamic code generation would have made it much more robust without a lot of effort, but it was just too foreign (or at least not advertised as being used in places well enough), too new, and when you Googled it the "major" issues developers had scared everyone.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  What major issues?
- hnzix 8y ago
  > I worked on a huge JVM based project and even though no one in the company knew Java there was just no selling upper management on using Clojure. Just tell management you're using a Java library called Clojure, they'll never know the difference ;)

puredanger 8y ago

This sentiment is in direct conflict with all of the data in the survey, which shows increasing use and importance of that use. I know of more than one company that has bet big on Clojure in the last year and is succeeding where they have failed with other stacks at business-changing levels. I know of companies with 100s of Clojure devs. Download stats continue to trend up. Etc. The core team is rocking right now and feel like we are on the tail of lifting spec to the next level (and out of alpha), and interested in finding ways to work better with the community. Some many great ideas in the hopper for REBL and other things too. 2019 is going to be a great year for Clojure.

cutler 8y ago
Download stats mean nothing. The truth about Clojure adoption can be found by typing "title:Clojure" into Indeed.com. Search for United Kingdom and you'll find 4 Clojure jobs, 3 of which are in London.
- kingofhdds 8y ago
  Using "title:" you meaninglessly narrowed your search. There are postings like "Software engineer" with body saying "Developing with JS, and Clojure" which won't appear in your results. Number of "Clojure" results is 109, compared with 98 for "Haskell", for instance (in London, according to indeed.co.uk). So both are not scoring big, certainly, but those numbers are nevertheless better than 3-4 years ago.
  - marxama 8y ago
    In my experience (in Sweden), most of those results are "false positives". Companies/recruiters like to look for passionate programmers, so they put smaller languages like Clojure in their ads, even though the job itself has nothing to do with it.
    - kingofhdds 8y ago
      True, except they don't include languages just for being smaller (we don't see Befunge, or Unlambda there), but those associated with smartness, and passion for learning. In context of the discussion (dead/alive state), I wouldn't count this as a bad thing. There's no arguing that finding FP job is hundreds (or thousands, depending on city/country) times harder than OOP job. It doesn't mean all functional langs are dead.

nepeckman 8y ago

I'll offer a different take: Clojure is settled. It found its niche: a small/medium group of experienced professionals who like its practicality and power. There's a comment somewhere else in this section that Clojure devs are more experienced on average than JVM devs. I'd like to add another stat from the State of JS survey[0] that went out a while back. Developers who used ClojureScript had the highest salaries and most years of experience when compared to other compile-to-js languages. This narrative makes intuitive sense to me. Clojure is not the most beginner friendly language. It goes harder on functional programming concepts than the popular scripting languages, which is a bit of a learning curve. The cultural tendency to prefer smaller scoped libraries to broader frameworks means puts more cognitive load on the developer, who has to decide which libraries to use and how to wire them up. But this is a positive attribute for a more experienced developer, who might have strong opinions on how an application should be structured. [0] https://2018.stateofjs.com/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/

pr0tonic 8y ago
Clojure is not the most beginner friendly language. I really disagree here. My first job out of college was at a Clojure shop and it has been the easiest language I've ever learned. There is a small hurdle of switching to lisp syntax when all you've ever used is C style languages, but that's about it. I also find frameworks more effort to learn than pulling in a small library that does the one thing I need.
- nepeckman 8y ago
  I can really only speak from my personal experience here. I learned Clojure on my own time in college, and it took some time for me to understand how to deal with things like immutability, laziness, and pure functions. After I did finally 'get' it, I was unable to convince any of my classmates that the initial effort was worth it. I love the language and its opinions, but JavaScript (another language I learned on my own time) was probably 10x easier.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    "I learned Clojure on my own time in college, and it took some time for me to understand how to deal with things like immutability, laziness, and pure functions." I suspect much of that time was spent "unlearning" habits from procedural languages. I know Carnegie Mellon now teaches functional programming as the introductory course, and only introduces advanced topics like "mutability" later. I think that sequence makes it easier for beginners to reason about what their program is going to do and experience less frustration.

hota_mazi 8y ago

The trend of programming languages is to move toward static typing. Not as an afterthought, with gradual typing or retrofitted years later into an unwilling compiler, but languages designed from day one with static typing, parametric polymorphism, and type inference. Clojure's life time was limited from day one because it's simply going against the trend.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Because python or Javascript aren't a thing?
- purple_ducks 8y ago
  Given the huge uptake on Typescript, I don't think using JS as an example makes sense. Static typing helps. It doesn't have to be Java-esque. F# & friends have really nice static type systems where you don't need to declare types for most things - they're automatically inferred.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Seems like javascript is destined to be here for the long haul despite the presence of typescript. In fact static type proponents have been predicting the death of dynamic type languages since this gulf became apparent. Thus far reports of one camps deaths have been greatly exaggerated by the other.
    - munificent 8y ago
      No one is arguing that dynamically typed languages are all going to die out (though CoffeeScript and Perl certainly aren't doing well). Languages almost never die. People are still writing COBOL. But the relative share of programmers writing code in statically typed languages appears to be increasing. When the web got big, there was a very rapid growth in dynamically typed scripting languages: Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Then, when client side web development became a thing, JS got huge and then CoffeeScript. In the past decade or so as developers have moved to writing larger more performance-intensive client-side applications (read: mobile with touch UIs running at 60 FPS), there is now a turn back towards static typing: TypeScript, Kotlin, Swift, etc. Also, the sophistication of static type systems is increasing. Generics are now a given, control over variance is increasingly common, as is static control over null references. This doesn't mean the graph will go towards static types forever, but it certainly appears to be right now.

ilikehurdles 8y ago

There are literally 10-100 times more clojure jobs in every market I’ve searched than Julia or D jobs. The ecosystem continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and third party developer tooling and integrations keep expanding. HN has been bullish on D for at least 10 years going and yet all the _new_ systems programming roles in my city are C++ and a bit of Rust.

cutler 8y ago
"title:Clojure"/United Kingdom at Indeed.co.uk produces 4 Clojure jobs. Go figure.
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  I’ve been a software engineer and a backend engineer but I’ve bever been a “clojure engineer”. Why needlessly require the language in the title? Any reference to it anywhere in the body is unambiguously referring to the same programming language. Anyway, using LinkedIn, roughly 70 results in Boston, 30 in Denver, 130 in San Francisco. 867 across the US. I worked for three years with clojure and just chose between two new job offers after a short search, also in clojure. I’m seeing the language get use in microservices in larger, more established orgs that may already have a jvm docker image that their devops supports.

michaelmrose 8y ago

Alternatively you could just not badly interpret gossip and turn it into unfounded broad pronouncements. You are the guy who manages to turn the rumor that Clarice in accounting is home sick with a cold into Clarice is dying of cancer.

draw_down 8y ago

Implicit narrative?