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This is a great conceptual point that I think can be missed by folks who prefer a constellation of quality library-style code over a single framework. It's true

This is a great conceptual point that I think can be missed by folks who prefer a constellation of quality library-style code over a single framework. It's true that the *nix ecosystem is a case of the former over the latter, and I think that can work nicely for library level code that is used to build applications. But, it's hard to build protocols; or maybe, more accurately, it looks like successful ones emerge rather than are constructed. The closer you get to the application layer, the more it looks like high quality, opinionated frameworks and ecosystems are great. You get more mileage out of a sophisticated foundation once you're at that point, so your integration risk surface is higher if you choose to roll your own framework. To some extent, this is unavoidable, but I've always gotten value out of minimizing it. To some extent, I think Clojure has some great things going for it because it can hook into the JVM and the Java package ecosystem. But if that's ignored, then it's essentially starting from scratch. For folks who have production experience in Clojure: how valuable is Java interop in your experience? How often are you able to get away with using the most idiomatic parts of the Clojure-land ecosystem, and how often do you have to reach for Java-land? How easy is interop in terms of traceability?

synthc 7y ago
> For folks who have production experience in Clojure: how valuable is Java interop in your experience? ] Very, there a lots of high quality Java libraries, and interop makes it easy to use them. Especially when integration with other software (databases, message queues, etc) being able to use the Java client libraries is a blessing.
didibus 7y ago
> how valuable is Java interop in your experience? Clojure is designed to be a hosted language, and so Java interop is first class and integral to it. In fact, the standard library specifically excludes anything that overlaps with Java's, and is designed to complement the existing Java standard library. > How often are you able to get away with using the most idiomatic parts of the Clojure-land ecosystem, and how often do you have to reach for Java-land? It's not really like that, they complement each other and work in a symbiosis. Yes, sometimes it feels like the worst part of Clojure is Java, but not reinventing the wheel and leveraging battle tested Java libraries and tooling was a very smart pragmatic decision, so it's also the best part of Clojure. Just know using Java from Clojure is very idiomatic in of itself. > How easy is interop in terms of traceability? Pretty much seamless.

synthc 7y ago

> For folks who have production experience in Clojure: how valuable is Java interop in your experience? ] Very, there a lots of high quality Java libraries, and interop makes it easy to use them. Especially when integration with other software (databases, message queues, etc) being able to use the Java client libraries is a blessing.

didibus 7y ago

> how valuable is Java interop in your experience? Clojure is designed to be a hosted language, and so Java interop is first class and integral to it. In fact, the standard library specifically excludes anything that overlaps with Java's, and is designed to complement the existing Java standard library. > How often are you able to get away with using the most idiomatic parts of the Clojure-land ecosystem, and how often do you have to reach for Java-land? It's not really like that, they complement each other and work in a symbiosis. Yes, sometimes it feels like the worst part of Clojure is Java, but not reinventing the wheel and leveraging battle tested Java libraries and tooling was a very smart pragmatic decision, so it's also the best part of Clojure. Just know using Java from Clojure is very idiomatic in of itself. > How easy is interop in terms of traceability? Pretty much seamless.