4 ms·

Instead of just measuring how many developers adopt Clojure and how difficult/easy that is, I'd also love a measure of how many developers Clojure "puts out of

Instead of just measuring how many developers adopt Clojure and how difficult/easy that is, I'd also love a measure of how many developers Clojure "puts out of business". IME Clojure is quite aggressive on that front. In 2017 a customer wanted a set of services written in Clojure. Based on their Java experience they wanted to hire 10 devs. When I arrived they had 4, over the 1.5-year period I was there, they hired and fired 4. When I left they had 3. All 3 were not experienced in Clojure prior to the project (Java), but by 2018 each knew the entire codebase and was able to modify it and able to step in for each other. They spent less than half of their budget and all goals were met ahead of schedule. IME learning how to put Clojure and its ecosystem in good use takes more time and effort than other languages, but its effectiveness really compensates.

bambataa 7y ago
Were they fired because they weren’t good enough at Clojure? Perhaps all Clojure did was filter out less capable performers. The small team of skilled developers might have been just as fast in Java if they weren’t encumbered by the mediocre ones.
- christophilus 7y ago
  That’s still an argument in favor of Clojure. People spend loads of time and money trying to figure out how to do such filters. If it comes for free by choosing Clojure, that’s pretty great.
  - The_Colonel 7y ago
    I doubt this filtering is in any way done by Clojure though. It's difficult to recognize top performers in interviews, but it's much easier to see that in day to day work. What is usually missing is the willingness to fire people for not being top performers.
- lgrapenthin 7y ago
  I was mainly concerned with teaching Clojure in this project as everyone had little or no experience prior, so nobody was blocked by learners. Those who were fired all had one thing in common: They refused to adopt Clojure beyond its syntax in favor of patterns they learned to rely on in another language. This varied from porting Scala polymorphism to just banging out imperative while loops with atoms. I don't think they were incapable. They simply didn't want to learn it. Code reviews turned into arguments quickly, took endless time and lead nowhere. Their code was never touched by those who stayed and were able to work together. Later it was rewritten, because in spite of tons of unit tests (which passed), it was full of bugs. The code was considered "write-only". The rewrites averaged at 5-10% LOC.
tabtab 7y ago
I've heard this "mass productivity" claim from Lisp fans multiple times before, and am skeptical. Lisp has been around for about 60-ish years, yet no software house has been able to conquer the software market using it. It doesn't seem to scale to bigger teams and long-term maintenance. Developers can easily create abstractions that fit their own head, but not necessarily other heads. They blame the problems on the other readers rather than their spaghetti mind map. If I could make my own language and stack, I too would be mega-productive. However, others likely wouldn't like it and be confused by it, even though it's dirt obvious to me. Roll-your-own has limits. Sometimes 2 or 3 like-minded Lisp developers connect and roll for a while, but over time they will find it a lucky match-up that the real-world can't repeatedly recreate. Lightning in a bottle evaporates easily. The bottleneck of "paycheck" programming productivity is communicating between human beings, who may shift over time. Cranking out compact code fast is secondary to this. Program for people, not machines and not cleverness graders.
- lispm 7y ago
  Actually quite a bunch of 20 year or older Lisp software is developed in teams. Cyc is developed by a team since the early 80s. Reduce since the mid 70s. The SBCL and CMUCL Lisp implementations come out of the early 80s. Maxima has its roots in the late 60s/early 70s. The commercial Lisp systems from Franz and LispWorks are developed since the mid/end 80s. ACL2 (a theorem prover used in the chip business) comes from the early 90s. ITA (now Google) started mid 90s. GNU Emacs is from the early 80s. Autocd/Autolisp comes from the early 80s. PTC's Lisp-based CAD system (with a few million lines of Lisp code) must have been originally 2000 or earlier...
  - tabtab 7y ago
    I don't dispute it has niches where it does well, or at least "works". The implication often given is general purpose productivity superiority.
    - Goladus 7y ago
      > The implication often given is general purpose productivity superiority. The post you responded to specifically used Java as an example, though. Clojure specifically is clearly targeted as an alternative to writing raw Java. A number of other languages rushed in to compete for that space, and while Scala and Kotlin seem to be more popular than Clojure, I have to admit the only JVM app I actually rely on now, uses Clojure. Puppetdb, specifically. Puppet is a ruby project, but the database component is written in Clojure. I dislike Puppet for many reasons (syntax, coupling, architecture), but not because of its database backend.

bambataa 7y ago

Were they fired because they weren’t good enough at Clojure? Perhaps all Clojure did was filter out less capable performers. The small team of skilled developers might have been just as fast in Java if they weren’t encumbered by the mediocre ones.

christophilus 7y ago
That’s still an argument in favor of Clojure. People spend loads of time and money trying to figure out how to do such filters. If it comes for free by choosing Clojure, that’s pretty great.
- The_Colonel 7y ago
  I doubt this filtering is in any way done by Clojure though. It's difficult to recognize top performers in interviews, but it's much easier to see that in day to day work. What is usually missing is the willingness to fire people for not being top performers.
lgrapenthin 7y ago
I was mainly concerned with teaching Clojure in this project as everyone had little or no experience prior, so nobody was blocked by learners. Those who were fired all had one thing in common: They refused to adopt Clojure beyond its syntax in favor of patterns they learned to rely on in another language. This varied from porting Scala polymorphism to just banging out imperative while loops with atoms. I don't think they were incapable. They simply didn't want to learn it. Code reviews turned into arguments quickly, took endless time and lead nowhere. Their code was never touched by those who stayed and were able to work together. Later it was rewritten, because in spite of tons of unit tests (which passed), it was full of bugs. The code was considered "write-only". The rewrites averaged at 5-10% LOC.

tabtab 7y ago

I've heard this "mass productivity" claim from Lisp fans multiple times before, and am skeptical. Lisp has been around for about 60-ish years, yet no software house has been able to conquer the software market using it. It doesn't seem to scale to bigger teams and long-term maintenance. Developers can easily create abstractions that fit their own head, but not necessarily other heads. They blame the problems on the other readers rather than their spaghetti mind map. If I could make my own language and stack, I too would be mega-productive. However, others likely wouldn't like it and be confused by it, even though it's dirt obvious to me. Roll-your-own has limits. Sometimes 2 or 3 like-minded Lisp developers connect and roll for a while, but over time they will find it a lucky match-up that the real-world can't repeatedly recreate. Lightning in a bottle evaporates easily. The bottleneck of "paycheck" programming productivity is communicating between human beings, who may shift over time. Cranking out compact code fast is secondary to this. Program for people, not machines and not cleverness graders.

lispm 7y ago
Actually quite a bunch of 20 year or older Lisp software is developed in teams. Cyc is developed by a team since the early 80s. Reduce since the mid 70s. The SBCL and CMUCL Lisp implementations come out of the early 80s. Maxima has its roots in the late 60s/early 70s. The commercial Lisp systems from Franz and LispWorks are developed since the mid/end 80s. ACL2 (a theorem prover used in the chip business) comes from the early 90s. ITA (now Google) started mid 90s. GNU Emacs is from the early 80s. Autocd/Autolisp comes from the early 80s. PTC's Lisp-based CAD system (with a few million lines of Lisp code) must have been originally 2000 or earlier...
- tabtab 7y ago
  I don't dispute it has niches where it does well, or at least "works". The implication often given is general purpose productivity superiority.
  - Goladus 7y ago
    > The implication often given is general purpose productivity superiority. The post you responded to specifically used Java as an example, though. Clojure specifically is clearly targeted as an alternative to writing raw Java. A number of other languages rushed in to compete for that space, and while Scala and Kotlin seem to be more popular than Clojure, I have to admit the only JVM app I actually rely on now, uses Clojure. Puppetdb, specifically. Puppet is a ruby project, but the database component is written in Clojure. I dislike Puppet for many reasons (syntax, coupling, architecture), but not because of its database backend.