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I've noticed HackerNews has a lot of Clojure activists posting. I worked with Clojure for about a month. Then I decided to go back to NodeJS. - I have no nee

by pdub1 7y ago

I've noticed HackerNews has a lot of Clojure activists posting. I worked with Clojure for about a month. Then I decided to go back to NodeJS. - I have no need to java or JVM. - The Clojure stack traces aren't easily decipherable - One doesn't need Clojure for functional, immutable programming. NodeJS is flexible & has a massive community with tons of packages, including ones for immutable work. Functional programming on the other hand is simple-- just create & use JS functions (in the context of JS that is). - Ultimately I saw no need for Clojure What I do see though, is a small group of outspoken activists pushing clojure. Now, why don't I want to use it, besides what I've written above? Another contributor to my dislike of the language/"community" is the founder's stance-- Rich Hickey in this commentary "Open Source is not about you" https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey_open_source_is_not_about_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey... Clojure is owned by Cognitect. Any changes to be made must be (very slowly or not at all) approved by Rich Hickey. This is a language with a development/expansion/growth bottleneck of one person. This particular person considers the language his property-- which it is, he created it after all. But once I realized this, I immediately moved back to the NodeJS & Python communities. Also, Clojure libraries are mostly abandoned. Clojure's heyday seemed to be around 2005-2013 or so. Sure, you can find a couple recent ones like Reagent (for ReactJS rendering) which is a few versions behind ReactJS. After working with it though, I saw no real benefit over simply using ReactJS directly. In fact, I found it cumbersome to have to work through two potential layers of errors: ClojureScript & Javascript. Now we just see activists trying to pump it up in the news. I'd rather read about the interesting new things happening with JS and Python. TL;DR; After working at a company with Clojure & ClojureScript, I realized that: 1. It's practically closed source 2. Most of its packages are abandoned 3. There is a small vocal group of folks pushing it... despite the fact that the community leaders seem to have (and claim to have) no interest in the community that has grown around the language. 4. Personally, I'd rather work with React directly than some transpiled language on top of it (which I have no use/need for, given that I have no use/need for java)

tosh 7y ago
What I like about Clojure is that it allows me to build things on top of both the Java as well as the JavaScript ecosystem while using a very well designed simple language that comes with a friendly very supportive community. This means I benefit from a lot of the things that are going on in JavaScript and Java land over time like improvements in runtimes and libraries. Being able to use React from ClojureScript or being able to use GraalVM is actually a good example for this. I do think that onboarding and figuring out what went wrong and why when you run into errors could be smoother. That said a lot of community effort is going into this recently. In hindsight I wish I had looked into Clojure earlier.
iLemming 7y ago
No need to be bitter just because you have failed to grasp what the language offers. There are good reasons why people keep discovering it and keep talking about it. Clojure is not "owned" by Cognitect, it's an open-source language. In a sense it's as much "owned" as Rust is owned by Mozilla, C# by MSFT and Golang by Google. Yes, changes to the core ultimately do need to be approved by Rich Hickey and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Clojure's stability is something of a legend. In no other language ecosystem you can update things with such impunity. Where other languages start crumbling under their own weight, Clojure over the years stayed true to its core principles - it's predictable, moving from one major version to another won't cost you weeks of your time. I don't know where you get the notion of Clojure libraries being abandoned. Just because people not coming up with yet another front-end framework every couple of weeks? I bet you just don't know Javascript to the point (or haven't worked on large enough projects) when it starts feeling very tiresome. Clojurescript offers multitude of tools to make it easier. That's why dev surveys like StackOverflow and State of JS show that Clojure is mainly chosen by more experienced programmers. Frankly, even one full month of working with any language is not enough to learn its idioms and become comfortable with it. You didn't like - it's fine, you have your own reasons. There are people who do like it and you're struggling to understand why. No, they are not fanatics, they are pragmatists. For example: whenever I need to write code in any language and for whatever reason it cannot be Clojure - I would first do my prototyping in Clojure and then translate it to the other language. Even doing that I'm still much more faster.
divs1210 7y ago
You should read this article[0]. Maybe you’ve never heard about Clojure, but it’s had a huge impact on you how program front-ends regardless. Redux, immutable data, time travel debugging, hot reloading — all of this has been inspired by the Clojure community. [0] https://blog.reactiveconf.com/clojure-your-eyes-81c040ccceb https://blog.reactiveconf.com/clojure-your-eyes-81c040ccceb
pjmlp 7y ago
Just like Google owns V8. Yes you can fork it, but good luck getting the money that Google pours into it.
fnordsensei 7y ago
Why in the world did you go through all that time and effort just to complain about there being people who like things that you don’t like? 1. Wrong 2. There’s a difference between “abandoned” and “done”. 3. About 83% wrong* 4. OK * The group is indeed small in relative terms
ken 7y ago
"Practically closed source" is a funny way to say "open source". I have not run across any Clojure libraries I wanted to use that were "abandoned". I've found some that have a low version number (< 1.0) and haven't had any commits in the past couple years, but that's because they do everything they set out to do, and have no (reported) bugs. I wish other ecosystems were this stable. I'm not sure exactly what complaint 3 is about. Is it that the leaders of a project aren't doing a good job of marketing and positioning, and don't understand their users? The first release of Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional", and warning it "is NOT portable" and "probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks". Python was developed for the Tanenbaum's Amoeba OS. If we use that as our barometer of a valid open source project, I don't think any project in the world is going to be judged suitable. The word "transpiled" seems to only exist so people can make fun of other programming languages. (Similarly, calling its users "outspoken activists".) Your JavaScript has a virtual machine, too. Are you suggesting it's better because it lacks an explicitly specified bytecode?

by pdub1 7y ago

tosh 7y ago

What I like about Clojure is that it allows me to build things on top of both the Java as well as the JavaScript ecosystem while using a very well designed simple language that comes with a friendly very supportive community. This means I benefit from a lot of the things that are going on in JavaScript and Java land over time like improvements in runtimes and libraries. Being able to use React from ClojureScript or being able to use GraalVM is actually a good example for this. I do think that onboarding and figuring out what went wrong and why when you run into errors could be smoother. That said a lot of community effort is going into this recently. In hindsight I wish I had looked into Clojure earlier.

iLemming 7y ago

No need to be bitter just because you have failed to grasp what the language offers. There are good reasons why people keep discovering it and keep talking about it. Clojure is not "owned" by Cognitect, it's an open-source language. In a sense it's as much "owned" as Rust is owned by Mozilla, C# by MSFT and Golang by Google. Yes, changes to the core ultimately do need to be approved by Rich Hickey and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Clojure's stability is something of a legend. In no other language ecosystem you can update things with such impunity. Where other languages start crumbling under their own weight, Clojure over the years stayed true to its core principles - it's predictable, moving from one major version to another won't cost you weeks of your time. I don't know where you get the notion of Clojure libraries being abandoned. Just because people not coming up with yet another front-end framework every couple of weeks? I bet you just don't know Javascript to the point (or haven't worked on large enough projects) when it starts feeling very tiresome. Clojurescript offers multitude of tools to make it easier. That's why dev surveys like StackOverflow and State of JS show that Clojure is mainly chosen by more experienced programmers. Frankly, even one full month of working with any language is not enough to learn its idioms and become comfortable with it. You didn't like - it's fine, you have your own reasons. There are people who do like it and you're struggling to understand why. No, they are not fanatics, they are pragmatists. For example: whenever I need to write code in any language and for whatever reason it cannot be Clojure - I would first do my prototyping in Clojure and then translate it to the other language. Even doing that I'm still much more faster.

divs1210 7y ago

You should read this article[0]. Maybe you’ve never heard about Clojure, but it’s had a huge impact on you how program front-ends regardless. Redux, immutable data, time travel debugging, hot reloading — all of this has been inspired by the Clojure community. [0] https://blog.reactiveconf.com/clojure-your-eyes-81c040ccceb https://blog.reactiveconf.com/clojure-your-eyes-81c040ccceb

pjmlp 7y ago

Just like Google owns V8. Yes you can fork it, but good luck getting the money that Google pours into it.

fnordsensei 7y ago

Why in the world did you go through all that time and effort just to complain about there being people who like things that you don’t like? 1. Wrong 2. There’s a difference between “abandoned” and “done”. 3. About 83% wrong* 4. OK * The group is indeed small in relative terms

ken 7y ago

"Practically closed source" is a funny way to say "open source". I have not run across any Clojure libraries I wanted to use that were "abandoned". I've found some that have a low version number (< 1.0) and haven't had any commits in the past couple years, but that's because they do everything they set out to do, and have no (reported) bugs. I wish other ecosystems were this stable. I'm not sure exactly what complaint 3 is about. Is it that the leaders of a project aren't doing a good job of marketing and positioning, and don't understand their users? The first release of Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional", and warning it "is NOT portable" and "probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks". Python was developed for the Tanenbaum's Amoeba OS. If we use that as our barometer of a valid open source project, I don't think any project in the world is going to be judged suitable. The word "transpiled" seems to only exist so people can make fun of other programming languages. (Similarly, calling its users "outspoken activists".) Your JavaScript has a virtual machine, too. Are you suggesting it's better because it lacks an explicitly specified bytecode?