5 ms·

> by far the best programming language I've ever used Would love to hear why? What is that make Clojure such a good experience for you?

invalidOrTaken 7y ago
Not the grandparent, but I realized the other day that I'm at nine years of clojure, so... What's made clojure so great, imo, is its unicorn status as a principled-yet-practical language. That "principled" part is not worthless---it means that a lot of great minds are drawn to it. Before react took over the world, clojure folks were already taking steps in that direction. A lot of other things. The "sequence" as a core abstraction is very powerful. Immutable data structures by default make functional programming perfomant and efficient. Speaking of data structures, data structure literals have spoiled me for other languages. After Java, especially. And none of this mentions clojure's lispiness. The ease of metaprogramming has allowed the community to build some of the best tooling out there, between CIDER for emacs, and Figwheel for the browser---oh, did I forget to mention clojurescript? Being able to reuse code on the front and backend is great for web applications. Clojure isn't "everything." I think I'd still benefit from learning Haskell, APL, and Forth, and I wouldn't mind knowing Ruby and js a bit better. And I'll probably be dragged back to Python and R if I keep doing maths. But if someone asked me which single language would probably do the most for them professionally, I'd say clojure. It's the language people start startups so they can use it.
- amelius 7y ago
  What is GUI programming like in Clojure? What libraries exist, and what paradigms are used? E.g. is it more like React or is it more like Gtk/Qt?
  - 6thaccount2 7y ago
    There is a swing example on the getting started page (or there was a few years ago). It was a one liner to have a Swing pop up say "hello world" or something like that. I'm not sure how easy it is to write actual apps that way.
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    For web frontend (ClojureScript) there's reagent and re-frame, the Clojure versions of React and Redux.
  - logicprog 7y ago
    There's a really good UI framework for Clojure (not ClojureScript) called seesaw. If I recall correctly it was swing, but it's a very nice data focused, functional library. It really works well with the Clojure philosophy and interactive development. It's also VERY complete. There are downsides, however. The UIs that it creates definitely look like Swing apps. I.e. ugly at least on Linux. Also, the up to date documentation is difficult to find, I'll like to it here when I get home. The GitHub-linked docs work fine, but they do miss a few features.
  - geokon 7y ago
    Seesaw/swing are the old stable solution. The latest library is cljfx built on JavaFX. The developer is very responsive and open about it's development Check out the examples/mini-tutorial: https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx It's all React-like. You have a state atom and a GUI map data structure (which I think is equivalent to your DOM in React..) and then you hook up events that update the state and blah blah. It's all very clean and easy to read/use. The underlying JavaFX is also great for an OO GUI library so it's not gross to dive into if you need it
  - serpix 7y ago
    For frontend Reagent (React but with just Clojure functions and data structures. No classes, no jsx, just one language and immutable data.), and re-frame which does state management and event dispatching better than the competition. Redux is a poor poor imitation.
- cutler 7y ago
  I wish the last bit was true. Clojure jobs are very thin on the ground even here in startup London.
heartofgold 7y ago
Not original poster, but my take is: - Immutable data-structures with concise literals for lists, vectors, maps, and sets. Having pure functions and immutable data-structures makes code easier to reason about, easier to test, and thread-safe. (But clojure doesn't "force" you to be pure. The idea is that you write as much of your code in pure functions as you can, and push the IO and impure parts to the extremities. It's very pragmatic in this way, and you can get real work done.) - Simple syntax: While the syntax may be intimidating at first and arithmetic looks weird to untrained eye, once you realize that everything is a function (or a special form that also looks just like a function), the very light syntax and consistency feels amazing/refreshing. - Macro system: This is tied to the previous point. Since all your code is technically a "list", and you have something akin to a pre-processor where you have the full library of clojure functions to manipulate data. But in this pre-processing phase, your data is the code. (the code is a list). Now you can dynamically re-arrange or re-write code. Lookup homoiconicty and learn about the kinds of things you can do in macros that can't be done in other languages. - Capabilitis for general programming, abstractions, code re-use etc. - Performance is quite good. It's often nearly as fast as java, yet your codebase might be 10x smaller because the language is so expressive. - Concise/expressiveness. Clojure comes with a nice built-in library with generic functions that you re-use again and again. Give a programmer a few dozen of these functions and it's amazing what can be composed to solve many problems succinctly and elegantly. - There are surely other benefits, but the last one I'll leave with is hard to explain unless you have felt it before. It's REPL driven development. Clojure comes with some seriously awesome REPLs (i.e. a shell for interactive tinkering with the language). Other languages may have some form of REPL, but no other language in my experience has come close to the feel you get in a clojure REPL. I can best explain it as a freedom of very light-weight experimentation that you use to write your code. It's a playground for writing functions with very quick feedback to see if your code will work or not. One factor that makes the clojure repl experience so nice ties back again to the succinctness and expressiveness of the language. Typing commands in the repl is painless because it's concise, not a lot to type, and then the feedback is so instant. Somehow when I write code in python, java, javascript, or other languages, I just don't use their REPL or shell as often. It's just not quite the same as the clojure repl experience.
- 7y ago
cutler 7y ago
Dynamic and functional. Lazy evaluation. Real immutable data structures. Core.async. A modern lisp not constrained by the exclusive use of parens, ie. [] for vectors and {} for sets & maps as with JS, Python and Ruby. Real REPL-driven development. Macros. Spacemacs with CIDER. Polymorphism which beats OOP at its own game. Massive Java ecosystem at your fingertips plus 25000 pure Clojure libraries and last, but by no means least - a rock 'n roll BDFL with a mullet.

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

Not the grandparent, but I realized the other day that I'm at nine years of clojure, so... What's made clojure so great, imo, is its unicorn status as a principled-yet-practical language. That "principled" part is not worthless---it means that a lot of great minds are drawn to it. Before react took over the world, clojure folks were already taking steps in that direction. A lot of other things. The "sequence" as a core abstraction is very powerful. Immutable data structures by default make functional programming perfomant and efficient. Speaking of data structures, data structure literals have spoiled me for other languages. After Java, especially. And none of this mentions clojure's lispiness. The ease of metaprogramming has allowed the community to build some of the best tooling out there, between CIDER for emacs, and Figwheel for the browser---oh, did I forget to mention clojurescript? Being able to reuse code on the front and backend is great for web applications. Clojure isn't "everything." I think I'd still benefit from learning Haskell, APL, and Forth, and I wouldn't mind knowing Ruby and js a bit better. And I'll probably be dragged back to Python and R if I keep doing maths. But if someone asked me which single language would probably do the most for them professionally, I'd say clojure. It's the language people start startups so they can use it.

amelius 7y ago
What is GUI programming like in Clojure? What libraries exist, and what paradigms are used? E.g. is it more like React or is it more like Gtk/Qt?
- 6thaccount2 7y ago
  There is a swing example on the getting started page (or there was a few years ago). It was a one liner to have a Swing pop up say "hello world" or something like that. I'm not sure how easy it is to write actual apps that way.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  For web frontend (ClojureScript) there's reagent and re-frame, the Clojure versions of React and Redux.
- logicprog 7y ago
  There's a really good UI framework for Clojure (not ClojureScript) called seesaw. If I recall correctly it was swing, but it's a very nice data focused, functional library. It really works well with the Clojure philosophy and interactive development. It's also VERY complete. There are downsides, however. The UIs that it creates definitely look like Swing apps. I.e. ugly at least on Linux. Also, the up to date documentation is difficult to find, I'll like to it here when I get home. The GitHub-linked docs work fine, but they do miss a few features.
- geokon 7y ago
  Seesaw/swing are the old stable solution. The latest library is cljfx built on JavaFX. The developer is very responsive and open about it's development Check out the examples/mini-tutorial: https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx It's all React-like. You have a state atom and a GUI map data structure (which I think is equivalent to your DOM in React..) and then you hook up events that update the state and blah blah. It's all very clean and easy to read/use. The underlying JavaFX is also great for an OO GUI library so it's not gross to dive into if you need it
- serpix 7y ago
  For frontend Reagent (React but with just Clojure functions and data structures. No classes, no jsx, just one language and immutable data.), and re-frame which does state management and event dispatching better than the competition. Redux is a poor poor imitation.
cutler 7y ago
I wish the last bit was true. Clojure jobs are very thin on the ground even here in startup London.

heartofgold 7y ago

Not original poster, but my take is: - Immutable data-structures with concise literals for lists, vectors, maps, and sets. Having pure functions and immutable data-structures makes code easier to reason about, easier to test, and thread-safe. (But clojure doesn't "force" you to be pure. The idea is that you write as much of your code in pure functions as you can, and push the IO and impure parts to the extremities. It's very pragmatic in this way, and you can get real work done.) - Simple syntax: While the syntax may be intimidating at first and arithmetic looks weird to untrained eye, once you realize that everything is a function (or a special form that also looks just like a function), the very light syntax and consistency feels amazing/refreshing. - Macro system: This is tied to the previous point. Since all your code is technically a "list", and you have something akin to a pre-processor where you have the full library of clojure functions to manipulate data. But in this pre-processing phase, your data is the code. (the code is a list). Now you can dynamically re-arrange or re-write code. Lookup homoiconicty and learn about the kinds of things you can do in macros that can't be done in other languages. - Capabilitis for general programming, abstractions, code re-use etc. - Performance is quite good. It's often nearly as fast as java, yet your codebase might be 10x smaller because the language is so expressive. - Concise/expressiveness. Clojure comes with a nice built-in library with generic functions that you re-use again and again. Give a programmer a few dozen of these functions and it's amazing what can be composed to solve many problems succinctly and elegantly. - There are surely other benefits, but the last one I'll leave with is hard to explain unless you have felt it before. It's REPL driven development. Clojure comes with some seriously awesome REPLs (i.e. a shell for interactive tinkering with the language). Other languages may have some form of REPL, but no other language in my experience has come close to the feel you get in a clojure REPL. I can best explain it as a freedom of very light-weight experimentation that you use to write your code. It's a playground for writing functions with very quick feedback to see if your code will work or not. One factor that makes the clojure repl experience so nice ties back again to the succinctness and expressiveness of the language. Typing commands in the repl is painless because it's concise, not a lot to type, and then the feedback is so instant. Somehow when I write code in python, java, javascript, or other languages, I just don't use their REPL or shell as often. It's just not quite the same as the clojure repl experience.

7y ago

cutler 7y ago

Dynamic and functional. Lazy evaluation. Real immutable data structures. Core.async. A modern lisp not constrained by the exclusive use of parens, ie. [] for vectors and {} for sets & maps as with JS, Python and Ruby. Real REPL-driven development. Macros. Spacemacs with CIDER. Polymorphism which beats OOP at its own game. Massive Java ecosystem at your fingertips plus 25000 pure Clojure libraries and last, but by no means least - a rock 'n roll BDFL with a mullet.