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This has generally been the approach in the Clojure community. Of course, lacking standard frameworks, every library gets abandoned every few years so you have

by thom 7y ago

This has generally been the approach in the Clojure community. Of course, lacking standard frameworks, every library gets abandoned every few years so you have to learn a new even cleverer one. And wherever you might benefit from a group of very cohesive abstractions (e.g. in data science) you’re instead left with a bunch of random incompatible things (that again, will be abandoned in due course).

simongray 7y ago
What are you talking about? Every Clojure library does not get abandoned. It's just a process of survival of the fittest, like with any language. The popular libraries in Clojure are (mostly) actively maintained like with any other language.
- thom 7y ago
  It's great that this has been your experience, but I'm on my fourth SQL library at this point. I've been through several HTML rendering libraries, same with authentication, same with config management. The zipper and component libraries I used are abandoned. The data science story is sad compared to the R or Python ecosystems: Incanter dying, clj-ml unmaintained, Fastmath is good for some random stuff but not comprehensive, tech.ml on the rise but still not standard to the point anything actually integrates with it, multiple competing viz libraries, some of which require a browser. Even core stuff like spec hasn't stabilised yet. I have used Clojure full time for 11 years and it's nonsense to pretend that the ecosystem doesn't have problems that most Ruby, R, Python or .NET developers don't have at all or as often, by virtue of them having strong frontrunning frameworks. I'm not saying they're necessarily more happy or productive than Clojurists, but there is constant churn everywhere in the Clojure ecosystem, and it increases the cognitive load on every project I have ever done in the language.
  - simongray 7y ago
    Well, let's agree to disagree then.
    - thom 7y ago
      If you like, but I don’t believe you can possibly have been using Clojure or ClojureScript in anger for very long if you haven’t had this experience.
      - simongray 7y ago
        You're not being rude, but you are being patronising. Since you've been using Clojure full time for 11 years, don't you think there's chance that you might be biased yourself? I mean, you've basically used it since it was only just released and the library ecosystem is bound to be in flux just after a new language gets any traction. I BTW never said Clojure was immune to churn. I just said it is comparable to any other language... which it is. You misrepresented my original reply which I find really disingenuous. It might not have been comparable to other languages a decade ago, but it sure is now. And the situation is much better than the most popular language at the moment, JavaScript. ... I've been using Clojure/ClojureScript as my only language for more than 3 years. Currently on my third Clojure job. Prior to that, I was a heavy user of mainly Python, PHP and Java... all of them in anger (that's such a weird expression, but whatever). I think your issues must be very tied to the data science domain? I've been following, though not actively using, the data science libraries in Clojure and it's true that the data science ecosystem seems quite immature compared to Python. Incanter was already DOA when I started using Clojure, Cortex came and went, Dragan's libraries are a sort of foundation that hasn't been tapped into yet, and now there's all this Python/R integration going on. Data visualisation seems to have converged heavily on Vega as of late. But I'm doing web development and parsing. I find that the ecosystem is very stable for that sort of usage. Reagent is the default for frontend, Re-frame the most popular state-management library. There's an ecosystem around these two libraries that many tap into. There are basically only two popular SQL libs available (hug and honey, both using jdbc at their core), so you just pick whichever one fits your use case the best. It sucks that you went through 4 different ones, but I don't think that's very representative. Ring is the standard protocol for most web backends. There seems to be a convergence towards Datomic-style Datalog for newer Clojure databases. Instaparse is the only game in town for parsing using grammars and Clojure spec is widely used (although it's alpha) and can also used for certain forms of parsing. The only thing I've really been changing has been my tooling, moving from Leiningen/figwheel to Clojure CLI/Shadow-cljs. And I didn't have to do that, it was only done out of an interest to explore these newer tools.

by thom 7y ago

simongray 7y ago

What are you talking about? Every Clojure library does not get abandoned. It's just a process of survival of the fittest, like with any language. The popular libraries in Clojure are (mostly) actively maintained like with any other language.

thom 7y ago
It's great that this has been your experience, but I'm on my fourth SQL library at this point. I've been through several HTML rendering libraries, same with authentication, same with config management. The zipper and component libraries I used are abandoned. The data science story is sad compared to the R or Python ecosystems: Incanter dying, clj-ml unmaintained, Fastmath is good for some random stuff but not comprehensive, tech.ml on the rise but still not standard to the point anything actually integrates with it, multiple competing viz libraries, some of which require a browser. Even core stuff like spec hasn't stabilised yet. I have used Clojure full time for 11 years and it's nonsense to pretend that the ecosystem doesn't have problems that most Ruby, R, Python or .NET developers don't have at all or as often, by virtue of them having strong frontrunning frameworks. I'm not saying they're necessarily more happy or productive than Clojurists, but there is constant churn everywhere in the Clojure ecosystem, and it increases the cognitive load on every project I have ever done in the language.
- simongray 7y ago
  Well, let's agree to disagree then.
  - thom 7y ago
    If you like, but I don’t believe you can possibly have been using Clojure or ClojureScript in anger for very long if you haven’t had this experience.
    - simongray 7y ago
      You're not being rude, but you are being patronising. Since you've been using Clojure full time for 11 years, don't you think there's chance that you might be biased yourself? I mean, you've basically used it since it was only just released and the library ecosystem is bound to be in flux just after a new language gets any traction. I BTW never said Clojure was immune to churn. I just said it is comparable to any other language... which it is. You misrepresented my original reply which I find really disingenuous. It might not have been comparable to other languages a decade ago, but it sure is now. And the situation is much better than the most popular language at the moment, JavaScript. ... I've been using Clojure/ClojureScript as my only language for more than 3 years. Currently on my third Clojure job. Prior to that, I was a heavy user of mainly Python, PHP and Java... all of them in anger (that's such a weird expression, but whatever). I think your issues must be very tied to the data science domain? I've been following, though not actively using, the data science libraries in Clojure and it's true that the data science ecosystem seems quite immature compared to Python. Incanter was already DOA when I started using Clojure, Cortex came and went, Dragan's libraries are a sort of foundation that hasn't been tapped into yet, and now there's all this Python/R integration going on. Data visualisation seems to have converged heavily on Vega as of late. But I'm doing web development and parsing. I find that the ecosystem is very stable for that sort of usage. Reagent is the default for frontend, Re-frame the most popular state-management library. There's an ecosystem around these two libraries that many tap into. There are basically only two popular SQL libs available (hug and honey, both using jdbc at their core), so you just pick whichever one fits your use case the best. It sucks that you went through 4 different ones, but I don't think that's very representative. Ring is the standard protocol for most web backends. There seems to be a convergence towards Datomic-style Datalog for newer Clojure databases. Instaparse is the only game in town for parsing using grammars and Clojure spec is widely used (although it's alpha) and can also used for certain forms of parsing. The only thing I've really been changing has been my tooling, moving from Leiningen/figwheel to Clojure CLI/Shadow-cljs. And I didn't have to do that, it was only done out of an interest to explore these newer tools.