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I have never really understood what people get from these slides, but my while my experience with clojure is extremely limited I can say that I found it to be r

I have never really understood what people get from these slides, but my while my experience with clojure is extremely limited I can say that I found it to be rather interesting but hard. I could not grasp several error messages, took me a long time to write something to a database and it didn't really feel at all natural to me. But I guess you'll have to get used to the functional nature, but I don't believe all the hype about functional programming in general. If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure. My experience is rather the reverse, it is harder and takes a long time to develop in. Maybe it's more predictable and is better software with less bugs in the long run, but I wouldn't really know since I lack the experience. A lot of programming languages today, like javascript, already has functional stuff within it. I get the appeal for it, but I'm not sure it's the best tool for every job or even most stuff. If anyone is willing to post a youtube-talk or something that can convince me of otherwise, please feel free.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
keymone 7y ago
here's a youtube link you were looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU
- ecmascript 7y ago
  That was disappointing, sorry. But that didn't really say anything about why functional programming would be better in the general sense.
balfirevic 7y ago
> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure. Whatever you might think about the qualities of Clojure, the above is almost certainly false.
LandR 7y ago
> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure. I don't think this is even remotely true. As much as everyone in this industry wants to believe it's fast paced and fast moving / evolving, it's hellishly slow in picking up on good ideas and will waste an exorbitant amount of time on bad ideas... Cool / Hip seems to be valued more than quality when it comes to languages / frameworks while the actually useful slowly, painfully slowly, trickles down.
- zaphirplane 7y ago
  Java, c# and python are hardly hip and rank as some of the most used languages
  - kls 7y ago
    I was around at the dawn of personal home computing and for the commercialization of internet technology so I have seen each of these come and go. Though they are not the cool kids anymore, the sheer volume of code keeps them around, and given that people have those skill-sets, new code gets produced in them. Java was certainly the fad dejure in it's time, OO was the craze and Java had just been dumped out on the internet, by Sun, for free. In a time when a good portion of compilers costed money (especially if you where not on an Intel based PC), you could learn Java for the price of an internet connection. c# was the cool kid if you where a Windows developer, Microsoft was looking to update their aging development stack and give themselves hardware portability, so they basically created the JVM for windows in the form of .NET . To ensure that people switched over they kicked the legs out of VB6 and pretty much forced everyone to the new dev stack. They offered a host of language that you could use to write windows apps, but they conformed all of them to the OO style that was popular at the time. With that said, VB.NET did not look like VB6 it looked a whole lot more like C# with VB syntax. So given that developers had to pretty much learn a new language even if it had familiar syntax most opted to just go ahead and learn c# as Microsoft was pimping c#. Python is the odd ball in your list as it kind of languished for a while. It was not obscure but it was more like Ruby, it had it's devotees but was rather flat, not obscure just flat. That being said, it did have it's cool kid, day in the sun and that was when Google started using it heavily. The AI winter really killed LISP as "the" AI language and there really was no heir apparent, that is until (IIRC) Google started producing some of their machine learning tech and they implemented it in Python. This instantly made Python the cool kid and people started adopting it. My opinion is that Google felt they where too heavily invested in Java and thus needed to diversify into another language. At the time there where not a lot of options that had the combination of mature enough/without legacy clutter/availability of developers, to make the cut, that is why I think Python made the short list. TLDR: the GP poster is right, popularity and trends have more to do with language adoption than technical merit does.
AlexCoventry 7y ago
> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure Blasphemy. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
iLemming 7y ago
> A lot of programming languages today, like javascript, already has functional stuff within it Yeah, but there's more to it than just that. You can find bits and pieces of good things in Clojure that influenced other languages, but in Clojure, they just feel right. Take, for example, immutable data-structures - there were many attempts to implement them for different languages, but somehow the way how they work in Clojure just feels subjectively better. Or the REPL. Of course, you'd say: Javascript has a REPL, Python has one, etc. But if you dig deeper, you'd find out that Clojure's REPL is somewhat better (it is hard to explain, one has to experience what makes it better). Standard library: Javascript is like a complete meth-head here - there's folktale, crocks, sanctuary, ramda, fantasyland, lodash, lodash-fp, immutable.js, etc. and you know, sometimes "more" is not necessarily "better"; Python's praised batteries can also be pretty frustrating. Whereas Clojure's standard library somehow feels much nicer and has a minimum amount of surprises. Stability of the language is almost legendary. Migrating a project from one version of Clojure to another won't cost you your leg. Yes, Clojure is not a silver bullet (there's no such thing as "the best general purpose PL"), but it's specifically designed to minimize the frustration. And if you felt different, you probably haven't had enough exposure to it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

keymone 7y ago

here's a youtube link you were looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU

ecmascript 7y ago
That was disappointing, sorry. But that didn't really say anything about why functional programming would be better in the general sense.

balfirevic 7y ago

> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure. Whatever you might think about the qualities of Clojure, the above is almost certainly false.

LandR 7y ago

> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure. I don't think this is even remotely true. As much as everyone in this industry wants to believe it's fast paced and fast moving / evolving, it's hellishly slow in picking up on good ideas and will waste an exorbitant amount of time on bad ideas... Cool / Hip seems to be valued more than quality when it comes to languages / frameworks while the actually useful slowly, painfully slowly, trickles down.

zaphirplane 7y ago
Java, c# and python are hardly hip and rank as some of the most used languages
- kls 7y ago
  I was around at the dawn of personal home computing and for the commercialization of internet technology so I have seen each of these come and go. Though they are not the cool kids anymore, the sheer volume of code keeps them around, and given that people have those skill-sets, new code gets produced in them. Java was certainly the fad dejure in it's time, OO was the craze and Java had just been dumped out on the internet, by Sun, for free. In a time when a good portion of compilers costed money (especially if you where not on an Intel based PC), you could learn Java for the price of an internet connection. c# was the cool kid if you where a Windows developer, Microsoft was looking to update their aging development stack and give themselves hardware portability, so they basically created the JVM for windows in the form of .NET . To ensure that people switched over they kicked the legs out of VB6 and pretty much forced everyone to the new dev stack. They offered a host of language that you could use to write windows apps, but they conformed all of them to the OO style that was popular at the time. With that said, VB.NET did not look like VB6 it looked a whole lot more like C# with VB syntax. So given that developers had to pretty much learn a new language even if it had familiar syntax most opted to just go ahead and learn c# as Microsoft was pimping c#. Python is the odd ball in your list as it kind of languished for a while. It was not obscure but it was more like Ruby, it had it's devotees but was rather flat, not obscure just flat. That being said, it did have it's cool kid, day in the sun and that was when Google started using it heavily. The AI winter really killed LISP as "the" AI language and there really was no heir apparent, that is until (IIRC) Google started producing some of their machine learning tech and they implemented it in Python. This instantly made Python the cool kid and people started adopting it. My opinion is that Google felt they where too heavily invested in Java and thus needed to diversify into another language. At the time there where not a lot of options that had the combination of mature enough/without legacy clutter/availability of developers, to make the cut, that is why I think Python made the short list. TLDR: the GP poster is right, popularity and trends have more to do with language adoption than technical merit does.

AlexCoventry 7y ago

> If it was so effective as people seem to claim, I am sure everybody would use clojure Blasphemy. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

iLemming 7y ago

> A lot of programming languages today, like javascript, already has functional stuff within it Yeah, but there's more to it than just that. You can find bits and pieces of good things in Clojure that influenced other languages, but in Clojure, they just feel right. Take, for example, immutable data-structures - there were many attempts to implement them for different languages, but somehow the way how they work in Clojure just feels subjectively better. Or the REPL. Of course, you'd say: Javascript has a REPL, Python has one, etc. But if you dig deeper, you'd find out that Clojure's REPL is somewhat better (it is hard to explain, one has to experience what makes it better). Standard library: Javascript is like a complete meth-head here - there's folktale, crocks, sanctuary, ramda, fantasyland, lodash, lodash-fp, immutable.js, etc. and you know, sometimes "more" is not necessarily "better"; Python's praised batteries can also be pretty frustrating. Whereas Clojure's standard library somehow feels much nicer and has a minimum amount of surprises. Stability of the language is almost legendary. Migrating a project from one version of Clojure to another won't cost you your leg. Yes, Clojure is not a silver bullet (there's no such thing as "the best general purpose PL"), but it's specifically designed to minimize the frustration. And if you felt different, you probably haven't had enough exposure to it.