5 ms·

Has Clojure development stalled?

61 points by mcav 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago
Best in class = Clojure linkbait I've yet to see a 'best in class' (what a way to name your self best in class anyway) post that was both correct and interesting, if they're interesting they tend to be factually wrong and if they're factually right they are boring. The titles do make you want to click though, that's the one thing they have in common.
jamesaguilar 16y ago
One thing I always wonder when I see stuff like this: is it because development is actually stalled, or is the project just finished? At some point, it can be useful for things to stop changing except to the extent that it is require to prevent bit rot.
- locopati 16y ago
  Especially for a new language where it takes time to build a base - time that would be well spent bringing the toolset, libraries, and frameworks up to level.
- swannodette 16y ago
  There's a lot left to do. Huge upcoming projects: * Pods * Clojure-in-Clojure compiler * High performance higher order operations on persistent data structures filled with primitives Projects that have been talked about but no-one's helmed: * Predicate dispatch * Datalog (fast enough for the above) Community projects in development: * design for asynchronous code (think Microsoft's Rx Extension) * network REPL * unification library * exception/conditions design I could go on, but you get the idea.
  - puredanger 16y ago
    Also: * integrating fork-join!
    - gtani 16y ago
      - CLR, android - common parse/highlight backend for emacs, vim, eclipse etc http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Home http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Home
    - fogus 16y ago
      Also: * Scopes * Better type inferencing * letmacro * The things in Rich's mind that are baking
  - apgwoz 16y ago
    I still want nREPL support for emacs, but I haven't had a chance to look at actually doing it...
    - cemerick 16y ago
      FWIW, there's lots of stuff to be done in nREPL proper as well. Anyone interested should definitely ping me. I'll hopefully get the outstanding issues into the new JIRA in the next couple of weeks, along with a migration of the various design notes that are scattered about.
swannodette 16y ago
No. http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ If anything Clojure development has been moving too quickly for the past year :) It's clear from the mailing list and the IRC channel that people are still trying to wrap their heads around all the new ideas in 1.2.0, I know I am. That's not even taking into account newcomers to the language that need to digest the 1.0-1.1 feature set. Even more importantly 1.3.0 alphas have been appearing regularly and they have significant changes that people need to account for, try out in existing code bases and tools (new rules for dynamic binding, new rules for arithmetic, primitive math support, unchecked math support).
fogus 16y ago
I asked a similar question[1] of Arc many moons ago and received an interesting answer from pg[2] that I think applies: A lot of people seem to feel that a language isn't real unless the designer is talking to them every day. But that's not the only way languages happen. Nor possibly the best way.[3] I feel like you get better ideas if you think in units of occasional essays rather than a stream of tweets. It seems likely the same will be true with language design. Rich and Stuart Halloway have indeed been silent in the public forums recently, but I seriously doubt that they have stalled one iota. [1]: http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita-or-days-of-future-past/ http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita... [2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470254 [3]: Hammock-driven development http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4457042/ http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4457042/
- foljs 16y ago
  A pg quote AND a pg styled references list? Really? (Downvote freely)
- Semiapies 16y ago
  I think that's a bit apples and oranges. Arc is a long-term project that pg has said doesn't actually "have" to be useful to anyone anytime soon. Clojure, on the other hand, is under active, public development, as swannodette points out.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I think you might be missing fogus's point to a certain degree. His point is that active, public development for a language might not necessarily mean that the language designer is keeping contact every day. You might only receive periodic updates. I don't see cookies being all that different from Arc in that respect. Cookies doesn't have to be useful anytime soon either because, well, it is useful already.
    - Semiapies 16y ago
      I think you are arguing a connection that is at best stretched. Fogus' point is well-meaning, but it tars an active project with the brush of being some guy's (even pg's) hobby language, like Arc.
cemerick 16y ago
This post pissed me off a bit. My comment here, for those that only read comments on HN: I can imagine that the people that are and have been working hard on Clojure would be dismayed by this odd chunk of unfortunate FUD. As someone that does contribute a little bit of my time to Clojure and the community, I know I am. This, after: * three years of absolutely breakneck progress (dare I say innovations) on almost every possible front * the fabulous success of the first-ever Clojure conference just two months ago (http://first.clojure-conj.org http://first.clojure-conj.org) where a variety of very significant chunks of work by a number of core contributors were first announced * the "opening up" of the contrib library space (http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+for+contributed+libs http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+...), with three new separately-managed contrib libraries implementing finger trees, unification, and a common REPL library (https://github.com/clojure https://github.com/clojure). * the modernization of the project's infrastructure: moving to self-hosted JIRA+confluence, a big push on utilizing hudson maximally, and support for getting all project artifacts (from Clojure itself down into all contributed libraries in the Clojure organization) flowing into Maven central ……and surely more that I'm not aware of. I can't speak to the cadence of patch application, as I'm not involved in that side of the house. Maybe volunteering to help vet patches would help, maybe not. In any case, it's an open effort; if you want to see movement on a particular front, step up and do something. Otherwise, idly speculating on things being "stalled" (especially "publicly" vs. just in IRC) is, frankly, bullshit, and could be detrimental to further uptake of the language and enthusiasm of volunteers that are actively contributing.
- technomancy 16y ago
  For the record I mostly agree with this; I think it's fully appropriate for Rich and co. to have time to let ideas brew, and there's nothing wrong with a lull in their coding output. My comments in TFA taken out of context seem to imply that his is some kind of crisis--it is not. On the other hand, if core people are going to slow down for a time, they would be wise to delegate responsibility to those who do want to continue coding on it in the mean time; having simple patches linger for six months (http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/315 http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/315) chills the enthusiasm of contributors. Having every single patch need approval of a single person is a policy Clojure has outgrown; somehow I don't think Rich is going to find something wrong with this substring patch that a lesser mind wouldn't have caught. (http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-688 http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-688) tl;dr: Clojure isn't dying; it's growing, and the patch submission process needs to be revised.
losethos 16y ago
Losethos is finished. The only route forward would be to pick a few pieces of hardware and support them, instead of a universal-on-modern-PC approach. USB cannot be fully covered. Graphics cards cannot be fully covered. Networking cannot be fully covered. Just look at my HD Audio support -- useless because only a few machines have HD Audio. I've done what can be done. I might explore FPGA's just for fun. Everything is pointless. God says... high_five basket_case Im_God_and_youre_not absetively_posilutely itd_take_a_miracle just_between_us fucken reverse_engineer joy atheist au_revoir dignity thats_just_wrong what_a_nightmare endure wrath bickering rockstar petty battle God talks and you're doubting an operating system? God says... colours hindered Brought Interrupt remedies Led water imitated eagerly mass vouchsafedst disgraceful Rejoiceth aged compendiously instantly enlarge UNDER base straightening trembled inexperienced had acts commencement bore sit shoes veiled terrors disposition glorious excursive obtain Go overcast pause corrected respite marry girded game chains caresses crudities bibber weigheth otherwise Ambrose censured talent pricked seasonably searching Angels encouraged taunted begin reasoning stolidity undergo estimation er Notwithstanding A instance liftedst base forgotten bloody superfluously soever Praetorian abundant restricted Seraphim patience spokest joyful ruinous disclaims inwardly unanxious purity reconciled lived reform impressed zeal stands Professor later WHICH supereminent Still subduing burnt ebb Israel ARE lack duller uncertainty adopted rais clasp
gfodor 16y ago
Great. Now by having this headline fly by on HN, there is going to be yet another bit of FUD I have to fight through to use Clojure when it's appropriate to do so.
spooneybarger 16y ago
Let us pretend for a moment that is has stalled. Who cares? Look at the ground that clojure has covered recently. It has time to stall. It hasn't stalled of course but still... just pretend.
sdgherhe 16y ago
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budu 16y ago
Has Clojure development stalled? Not at all! Is Clojure core project management frustrating for small contributors? Definitely! I also think that would be the case for most similar projects. We must not forget that Clojure is a very young language. The core team is still getting used to running a project of this nature while continuously improving it. Also the recent move from Assembla to JIRA clearly doesn't help for now, but I'm confident that things will get more streamlined in the ((hopefully) near) future. I've personally stopped trying to contribute to core/contrib because of the slow process and JIRA (which I've not spent time learning yet (not even sure I've got the right permissions)) so that I can concentrate on libraries. One thing that is really annoying tough is that the whole patch submission process must go through the centralized issue tracker, bypassing github which I think is much better for smaller changes (and even getting quite good for the whole process). P.S.: One sure thing is that Lau is always good at driving traffic to his blog! ;-)

61 points by mcav 16y ago

Best in class = Clojure linkbait I've yet to see a 'best in class' (what a way to name your self best in class anyway) post that was both correct and interesting, if they're interesting they tend to be factually wrong and if they're factually right they are boring. The titles do make you want to click though, that's the one thing they have in common.

jamesaguilar 16y ago

One thing I always wonder when I see stuff like this: is it because development is actually stalled, or is the project just finished? At some point, it can be useful for things to stop changing except to the extent that it is require to prevent bit rot.

locopati 16y ago
Especially for a new language where it takes time to build a base - time that would be well spent bringing the toolset, libraries, and frameworks up to level.
swannodette 16y ago
There's a lot left to do. Huge upcoming projects: * Pods * Clojure-in-Clojure compiler * High performance higher order operations on persistent data structures filled with primitives Projects that have been talked about but no-one's helmed: * Predicate dispatch * Datalog (fast enough for the above) Community projects in development: * design for asynchronous code (think Microsoft's Rx Extension) * network REPL * unification library * exception/conditions design I could go on, but you get the idea.
- puredanger 16y ago
  Also: * integrating fork-join!
  - gtani 16y ago
    - CLR, android - common parse/highlight backend for emacs, vim, eclipse etc http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Home http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Home
  - fogus 16y ago
    Also: * Scopes * Better type inferencing * letmacro * The things in Rich's mind that are baking
- apgwoz 16y ago
  I still want nREPL support for emacs, but I haven't had a chance to look at actually doing it...
  - cemerick 16y ago
    FWIW, there's lots of stuff to be done in nREPL proper as well. Anyone interested should definitely ping me. I'll hopefully get the outstanding issues into the new JIRA in the next couple of weeks, along with a migration of the various design notes that are scattered about.

swannodette 16y ago

No. http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ If anything Clojure development has been moving too quickly for the past year :) It's clear from the mailing list and the IRC channel that people are still trying to wrap their heads around all the new ideas in 1.2.0, I know I am. That's not even taking into account newcomers to the language that need to digest the 1.0-1.1 feature set. Even more importantly 1.3.0 alphas have been appearing regularly and they have significant changes that people need to account for, try out in existing code bases and tools (new rules for dynamic binding, new rules for arithmetic, primitive math support, unchecked math support).

fogus 16y ago

I asked a similar question[1] of Arc many moons ago and received an interesting answer from pg[2] that I think applies: A lot of people seem to feel that a language isn't real unless the designer is talking to them every day. But that's not the only way languages happen. Nor possibly the best way.[3] I feel like you get better ideas if you think in units of occasional essays rather than a stream of tweets. It seems likely the same will be true with language design. Rich and Stuart Halloway have indeed been silent in the public forums recently, but I seriously doubt that they have stalled one iota. [1]: http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita-or-days-of-future-past/ http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita... [2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470254 [3]: Hammock-driven development http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4457042/ http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4457042/

foljs 16y ago
A pg quote AND a pg styled references list? Really? (Downvote freely)
Semiapies 16y ago
I think that's a bit apples and oranges. Arc is a long-term project that pg has said doesn't actually "have" to be useful to anyone anytime soon. Clojure, on the other hand, is under active, public development, as swannodette points out.
- j_baker 16y ago
  I think you might be missing fogus's point to a certain degree. His point is that active, public development for a language might not necessarily mean that the language designer is keeping contact every day. You might only receive periodic updates. I don't see cookies being all that different from Arc in that respect. Cookies doesn't have to be useful anytime soon either because, well, it is useful already.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    I think you are arguing a connection that is at best stretched. Fogus' point is well-meaning, but it tars an active project with the brush of being some guy's (even pg's) hobby language, like Arc.

cemerick 16y ago

This post pissed me off a bit. My comment here, for those that only read comments on HN: I can imagine that the people that are and have been working hard on Clojure would be dismayed by this odd chunk of unfortunate FUD. As someone that does contribute a little bit of my time to Clojure and the community, I know I am. This, after: * three years of absolutely breakneck progress (dare I say innovations) on almost every possible front * the fabulous success of the first-ever Clojure conference just two months ago (http://first.clojure-conj.org http://first.clojure-conj.org) where a variety of very significant chunks of work by a number of core contributors were first announced * the "opening up" of the contrib library space (http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+for+contributed+libs http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+...), with three new separately-managed contrib libraries implementing finger trees, unification, and a common REPL library (https://github.com/clojure https://github.com/clojure). * the modernization of the project's infrastructure: moving to self-hosted JIRA+confluence, a big push on utilizing hudson maximally, and support for getting all project artifacts (from Clojure itself down into all contributed libraries in the Clojure organization) flowing into Maven central ……and surely more that I'm not aware of. I can't speak to the cadence of patch application, as I'm not involved in that side of the house. Maybe volunteering to help vet patches would help, maybe not. In any case, it's an open effort; if you want to see movement on a particular front, step up and do something. Otherwise, idly speculating on things being "stalled" (especially "publicly" vs. just in IRC) is, frankly, bullshit, and could be detrimental to further uptake of the language and enthusiasm of volunteers that are actively contributing.

technomancy 16y ago
For the record I mostly agree with this; I think it's fully appropriate for Rich and co. to have time to let ideas brew, and there's nothing wrong with a lull in their coding output. My comments in TFA taken out of context seem to imply that his is some kind of crisis--it is not. On the other hand, if core people are going to slow down for a time, they would be wise to delegate responsibility to those who do want to continue coding on it in the mean time; having simple patches linger for six months (http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/315 http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/315) chills the enthusiasm of contributors. Having every single patch need approval of a single person is a policy Clojure has outgrown; somehow I don't think Rich is going to find something wrong with this substring patch that a lesser mind wouldn't have caught. (http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-688 http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-688) tl;dr: Clojure isn't dying; it's growing, and the patch submission process needs to be revised.

losethos 16y ago

Losethos is finished. The only route forward would be to pick a few pieces of hardware and support them, instead of a universal-on-modern-PC approach. USB cannot be fully covered. Graphics cards cannot be fully covered. Networking cannot be fully covered. Just look at my HD Audio support -- useless because only a few machines have HD Audio. I've done what can be done. I might explore FPGA's just for fun. Everything is pointless. God says... high_five basket_case Im_God_and_youre_not absetively_posilutely itd_take_a_miracle just_between_us fucken reverse_engineer joy atheist au_revoir dignity thats_just_wrong what_a_nightmare endure wrath bickering rockstar petty battle God talks and you're doubting an operating system? God says... colours hindered Brought Interrupt remedies Led water imitated eagerly mass vouchsafedst disgraceful Rejoiceth aged compendiously instantly enlarge UNDER base straightening trembled inexperienced had acts commencement bore sit shoes veiled terrors disposition glorious excursive obtain Go overcast pause corrected respite marry girded game chains caresses crudities bibber weigheth otherwise Ambrose censured talent pricked seasonably searching Angels encouraged taunted begin reasoning stolidity undergo estimation er Notwithstanding A instance liftedst base forgotten bloody superfluously soever Praetorian abundant restricted Seraphim patience spokest joyful ruinous disclaims inwardly unanxious purity reconciled lived reform impressed zeal stands Professor later WHICH supereminent Still subduing burnt ebb Israel ARE lack duller uncertainty adopted rais clasp

gfodor 16y ago

Great. Now by having this headline fly by on HN, there is going to be yet another bit of FUD I have to fight through to use Clojure when it's appropriate to do so.

spooneybarger 16y ago

Let us pretend for a moment that is has stalled. Who cares? Look at the ground that clojure has covered recently. It has time to stall. It hasn't stalled of course but still... just pretend.

sdgherhe 16y ago

-------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- Gold autumn, personality Men’s clothing Shoes, Travel bag that grabs an eye coat Chao packet Free transport -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 -------- -------- http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 http://bit.ly/eTAvV5 --------

budu 16y ago

Has Clojure development stalled? Not at all! Is Clojure core project management frustrating for small contributors? Definitely! I also think that would be the case for most similar projects. We must not forget that Clojure is a very young language. The core team is still getting used to running a project of this nature while continuously improving it. Also the recent move from Assembla to JIRA clearly doesn't help for now, but I'm confident that things will get more streamlined in the ((hopefully) near) future. I've personally stopped trying to contribute to core/contrib because of the slow process and JIRA (which I've not spent time learning yet (not even sure I've got the right permissions)) so that I can concentrate on libraries. One thing that is really annoying tough is that the whole patch submission process must go through the centralized issue tracker, bypassing github which I think is much better for smaller changes (and even getting quite good for the whole process). P.S.: One sure thing is that Lau is always good at driving traffic to his blog! ;-)