7 ms·

Clojure as a dependency

138 points by nathell 6y ago

JackMorgan 6y ago
Just FYI to the author, I can't read this on Firefox mobile, the text is clipped weirdly. Reader mode does work however.
- nathell 6y ago
  Thanks for the report, will try to fix this.
  - daviddaviddavid 6y ago
    Since you're here, I'd just like to say that the font you're using (Bona Nova) is wonderful. I smiled ear to ear when I saw the capital-Q in the phrase "Quite possibly".
    - nathell 6y ago
      I'm so happy that you appreciate it! This is typographic patriotism on my part (I'm Polish). This typeface [1] is a design of the late Andrzej Heidrich, who also designed the banknotes of the Polish zloty. One of my two favourite Polish typefaces. The other is Antykwa Toruńska (Torunian Antiqua) [2], a 1960 design by Zygfryd Gardzielewski. [1]: http://bonanova.wtf/?lang=en http://bonanova.wtf/?lang=en [2]: https://jmn.pl/pliki/AntykwaTorunska-doc-en.pdf https://jmn.pl/pliki/AntykwaTorunska-doc-en.pdf
siscia 6y ago
I just find amazing that the project is working with clojure 1.2.0 as dependency, Which is about 8 years old. Clojure hold a soft spot in my heart for emotional reason, but the engineering behind it is top notch. If any of you need motivation to go and learn it! Please do it! You will never regret invest time in clojure.
- diggan 6y ago
  Hear hear! I've written about this (free online) book here on HN before but it really gave me the kick I needed (and lightweight humor) to actually start using Clojure(Script) professionally, so if you're on the edge, give "Clojure for the Brave and True" a try! https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/ https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/ > The lessons are carefully thought out and unique. From learning asynchronicity to the lyrics of Lady Gaga, to learning about thread lock in the context of drunken dwarves, every chapter is fresh and (in all honesty) beautiful. - Artur Malabarba, CIDER maintainer
  - jcadam 6y ago
    This is one of the few freely available online books I liked so much I actually purchased a print copy, even though I mostly used the online version while reading through it :)
    - kimi 6y ago
      And you are not alone. I admit I did the same, exactly because it was so good and I wanted to give something back.
  - mnm1 6y ago
    Great book. I loved it as my first clojure book! Thank you. Definitely would recommend to people wanting to learn clojure.
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  If any of you need motivation to go and learn it! Please do it! You will never regret invest time in clojure. Agree that Clojure is a good language to learn. If you plan to use it beyond educational purposes though, expect to hit many walls when/if you plan to write real world apps with it. The foundations are there but the ecosystem isn't. Someone will mention the Java libraries, but at that point you are not really writing Clojure. Also, be prepared to deal with the cultish obsession of the community. They have very strong opinions but will never elaborate.
diggan 6y ago
I've always found this thing of projects defining Clojure as a dependency of their project to be a artifact of that Clojure wants and aims to be a hosted language. So while it doesn't make much sense to have a Clojure project without Clojure included _somewhere_, it makes plenty of sense (in some specific use cases) to use Clojure as a library in a Java project with Maven, or JavaScript project with ClojureScript compiler as a library. So with this, are there other languages where they are explicitly designed to be "parasites" like Clojure? One could argue the many "compiled to JS" language are such, but they are always very hardcoded to JS, so not really parasitic like Clojure.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  The "hosted" part is not quite right. Clojure is hosted, but what I think you are referring to with the "parasite" metaphor is called "embedded." (Distinct use of the term embedded from its use to describe small systems hardware). Clojure was definitely designed to be both embedded and hosted, but those are distinct axes. There are lots of languages designed to be embedded as scripting or automation runtimes in other systems. Tcl, Lua, Python, Guile (a lisp)... Why embedded- pre-web, there used to be a practice of writing your infrastructure in systems language (C/C++) then writing your application tier in a scripting language. Countless games and GUI line of business tools on Windows were written this way. Java in this case was considered a "systems" language, and there is a long history of embedded languages for Java. My favorite JVM-embedded language was called Beanshell. This embedding was/is a use case for Clojure, important for "sneaking" Clojure in to the enterprise. The "designed" part implies that the scripting runtime plays nicely with process-owned resources like threads and memory, and has a well defined interface for exposing your infrastructure objects to the scripting layer. Post-web, if you squint, you can recognize this architecture in the DOM the browser (written in a systems language like C++ or Rust) exposes to its scripting tier (Javascript).
- lwb 6y ago
  Lua, certainly. Lua is basically a C library that just so happens to have a standalone interpreter. It's largely intended to be embedded in other programs, which it does very well considering it is pure C with (basically) no dependencies.
regularfry 6y ago
Wouldn't this be less of an issue if you could say '[org.clojure/clojure ">1.2.0"]'? Or any of the other version number matching formats rubygems, npm, cargo, or any of the other package managers seem to manage?
- nathell 6y ago
  You can, but this is discouraged. Unlike in other version management systems, Clojure tools do not use lockfiles; you're expected to be explicit about the version numbers you want. https://nelsonmorris.net/2012/07/31/do-not-use-version-ranges-in-project-clj.html https://nelsonmorris.net/2012/07/31/do-not-use-version-range...
  - regularfry 6y ago
    Why no lockfiles? I'm sure there's a reason, I just don't know what it is.
    - nathell 6y ago
      This question merits a detailed answer that I can't provide right now, but here are some pointers: https://hypirion.com/musings/lockfiles-are-not-the-only-option https://hypirion.com/musings/lockfiles-are-not-the-only-opti... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44521542/why-doesnt-gradle-or-maven-have-a-dependency-version-lock-file https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44521542/why-doesnt-grad...
      - regularfry 6y ago
        All those links really tell me is that the problem lockfiles solve has been arbitrarily ignored. "A solution can exist, it's just not currently implemented" seems to be the state of things, unless I've misread it. I'm all up for saying "thou shalt specify precise versions of library dependencies", but the specific case of `org.clojure/clojure` seems qualitatively different in that a precise version influences your consumers, and leaving it unspecified means your library might not work at all.

138 points by nathell 6y ago

Just FYI to the author, I can't read this on Firefox mobile, the text is clipped weirdly. Reader mode does work however.

nathell 6y ago
Thanks for the report, will try to fix this.
- daviddaviddavid 6y ago
  Since you're here, I'd just like to say that the font you're using (Bona Nova) is wonderful. I smiled ear to ear when I saw the capital-Q in the phrase "Quite possibly".
  - nathell 6y ago
    I'm so happy that you appreciate it! This is typographic patriotism on my part (I'm Polish). This typeface [1] is a design of the late Andrzej Heidrich, who also designed the banknotes of the Polish zloty. One of my two favourite Polish typefaces. The other is Antykwa Toruńska (Torunian Antiqua) [2], a 1960 design by Zygfryd Gardzielewski. [1]: http://bonanova.wtf/?lang=en http://bonanova.wtf/?lang=en [2]: https://jmn.pl/pliki/AntykwaTorunska-doc-en.pdf https://jmn.pl/pliki/AntykwaTorunska-doc-en.pdf

siscia 6y ago

I just find amazing that the project is working with clojure 1.2.0 as dependency, Which is about 8 years old. Clojure hold a soft spot in my heart for emotional reason, but the engineering behind it is top notch. If any of you need motivation to go and learn it! Please do it! You will never regret invest time in clojure.

diggan 6y ago
Hear hear! I've written about this (free online) book here on HN before but it really gave me the kick I needed (and lightweight humor) to actually start using Clojure(Script) professionally, so if you're on the edge, give "Clojure for the Brave and True" a try! https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/ https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/ > The lessons are carefully thought out and unique. From learning asynchronicity to the lyrics of Lady Gaga, to learning about thread lock in the context of drunken dwarves, every chapter is fresh and (in all honesty) beautiful. - Artur Malabarba, CIDER maintainer
- jcadam 6y ago
  This is one of the few freely available online books I liked so much I actually purchased a print copy, even though I mostly used the online version while reading through it :)
  - kimi 6y ago
    And you are not alone. I admit I did the same, exactly because it was so good and I wanted to give something back.
- mnm1 6y ago
  Great book. I loved it as my first clojure book! Thank you. Definitely would recommend to people wanting to learn clojure.
Scarbutt 6y ago
If any of you need motivation to go and learn it! Please do it! You will never regret invest time in clojure. Agree that Clojure is a good language to learn. If you plan to use it beyond educational purposes though, expect to hit many walls when/if you plan to write real world apps with it. The foundations are there but the ecosystem isn't. Someone will mention the Java libraries, but at that point you are not really writing Clojure. Also, be prepared to deal with the cultish obsession of the community. They have very strong opinions but will never elaborate.

diggan 6y ago

I've always found this thing of projects defining Clojure as a dependency of their project to be a artifact of that Clojure wants and aims to be a hosted language. So while it doesn't make much sense to have a Clojure project without Clojure included _somewhere_, it makes plenty of sense (in some specific use cases) to use Clojure as a library in a Java project with Maven, or JavaScript project with ClojureScript compiler as a library. So with this, are there other languages where they are explicitly designed to be "parasites" like Clojure? One could argue the many "compiled to JS" language are such, but they are always very hardcoded to JS, so not really parasitic like Clojure.

jonahbenton 6y ago
The "hosted" part is not quite right. Clojure is hosted, but what I think you are referring to with the "parasite" metaphor is called "embedded." (Distinct use of the term embedded from its use to describe small systems hardware). Clojure was definitely designed to be both embedded and hosted, but those are distinct axes. There are lots of languages designed to be embedded as scripting or automation runtimes in other systems. Tcl, Lua, Python, Guile (a lisp)... Why embedded- pre-web, there used to be a practice of writing your infrastructure in systems language (C/C++) then writing your application tier in a scripting language. Countless games and GUI line of business tools on Windows were written this way. Java in this case was considered a "systems" language, and there is a long history of embedded languages for Java. My favorite JVM-embedded language was called Beanshell. This embedding was/is a use case for Clojure, important for "sneaking" Clojure in to the enterprise. The "designed" part implies that the scripting runtime plays nicely with process-owned resources like threads and memory, and has a well defined interface for exposing your infrastructure objects to the scripting layer. Post-web, if you squint, you can recognize this architecture in the DOM the browser (written in a systems language like C++ or Rust) exposes to its scripting tier (Javascript).
lwb 6y ago
Lua, certainly. Lua is basically a C library that just so happens to have a standalone interpreter. It's largely intended to be embedded in other programs, which it does very well considering it is pure C with (basically) no dependencies.

regularfry 6y ago

Wouldn't this be less of an issue if you could say '[org.clojure/clojure ">1.2.0"]'? Or any of the other version number matching formats rubygems, npm, cargo, or any of the other package managers seem to manage?

nathell 6y ago
You can, but this is discouraged. Unlike in other version management systems, Clojure tools do not use lockfiles; you're expected to be explicit about the version numbers you want. https://nelsonmorris.net/2012/07/31/do-not-use-version-ranges-in-project-clj.html https://nelsonmorris.net/2012/07/31/do-not-use-version-range...
- regularfry 6y ago
  Why no lockfiles? I'm sure there's a reason, I just don't know what it is.
  - nathell 6y ago
    This question merits a detailed answer that I can't provide right now, but here are some pointers: https://hypirion.com/musings/lockfiles-are-not-the-only-option https://hypirion.com/musings/lockfiles-are-not-the-only-opti... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44521542/why-doesnt-gradle-or-maven-have-a-dependency-version-lock-file https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44521542/why-doesnt-grad...
    - regularfry 6y ago
      All those links really tell me is that the problem lockfiles solve has been arbitrarily ignored. "A solution can exist, it's just not currently implemented" seems to be the state of things, unless I've misread it. I'm all up for saying "thou shalt specify precise versions of library dependencies", but the specific case of `org.clojure/clojure` seems qualitatively different in that a precise version influences your consumers, and leaving it unspecified means your library might not work at all.