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I agree that it doesn't have to be a trade-off, but that mindset might explain why there is less focus on creating one-click installers. An example would be Cl

• roenxi 6y ago
  Clojure is an inspirational language that has some insightful opinions about how things should be done. A month spent learning Clojure is a great investment. A lifetime programming in Clojure would be a joy. But as I recall the original Rich Hickey talks on "Why Clojure?" he was explicit that dependency/project management were very hard problems that Clojure didn't really attempt to solve. I'm not aware of any Clojure tools that are best-of-breed for project management. Java has a better model for locking everything down (or maybe how the Linux Distros manage their repositories) and Python has a better model for just keeping up with the current state of things. I'm not aware of any half-and-half model that gives satisfying results. Clojure is inferior to Java in that aspect because the number of things to keep track of roughly doubles (for every concept there seems to be a Clojure version and a Java version) and library management is bizarre and warty - see also the horrible import/require/use/some other one I can't even remember mess. And then there is unpicking the syntax differences between using things in the (ns) macro vs calling direct. I dunno; maybe something changed but that part of the experience is a mess. Unusually poorly done in Clojure too, everything else was so lovely. I never got on top of it and I tried for months; as evidenced I can't even remember how to load a library after putting it down for a little while. Even assuming the classpath is correctly set. What would have to happen for a C programmer to forget #include "name.h" ?
  • microcolonel 6y ago
    > he was explicit that dependency/project management where very hard problems that Clojure didn't really attempt to solve. For what it's worth, having used Clojure for work for a couple years now, and ditching leiningen for deps.edn (built in package and dependency management that hooks into maven), I've not had an issue with it. You just add the dependencies to your deps.edn, and run your program. If your namespace needs something from a package, you add it to the (:require ...) section of your ns declaration. Here's an example ns from one of our messiest modules: (ns profusion.core (:require [clojure.core.match :refer [match]] [clojure.set :as set] [clojure.string :as string] [clojure.walk :as walk] [clojure.zip :as z] [instaparse.core :as insta] [profusion.infix :refer [infix-to-prefix]] [profusion.standard-library :refer [comparison]] [profusion.utils :refer :all] ) (:import (org.jgrapht Graph) (org.jgrapht.traverse TopologicalOrderIterator) (org.jgrapht.graph DefaultEdge SimpleDirectedGraph) )) To be clear, projects like this can be run with the base Clojure distribution, no additional tools required. > I'm not aware of any Clojure tools that are best-of-breed for project management. Java has a better model for locking everything down (or maybe how the Linux Distros manage their repositories) and Python has a better model for just keeping up with the current state of things. I'm not aware of any half-and-half model that gives satisfying results. deps.edn generally asks you for specific versions if you're getting things from maven, so you don't risk not "locking everything down". If you really want to lock everything down however, you should check all your dependencies into your source tree, this is an option that deps.edn supports well, through the :local keyword instead of :mvn/version for maven dependencies. That namespace declaration I showed you is from a subproject that we import into one of our other subprojects using the :local keyword, and the deps.edn for it just declares the source directories and and the dependencies, everything else is handled automatically.
    • roenxi 6y ago
      That is a perfectly reasonable way of doing things. However, the official reference [0] recommends: (1) Your way (but also throw in an :only and doesn't mention :refer) (2) (require 'clojure.contrib.def 'clojure.contrib.except 'clojure.contrib.sql) (3) (require '(clojure.contrib def except sql)) And leaves open a lot of room for someone to try to use (use) which is probably a mistake since you don't use it. And sometimes your way has [] and sometimes it doesn't. Pretty much at random considering '[profusion.utils :refer :all]'. And the official docs add in a dizzying number of combinations of quoting requirements to recall. It isn't the end of the world but that is a far cry from how good all the other parts of the language are. It is really sloppy and confusing to learn. There is no recommended approach and I personally can't remember which easy way I used last time so my personal projects cycle randomly. I think Clojure has the worst library loading mechanism of any language I think is good. Even your way has two completely different code paths (import vs require) to bring in dependencies. [0] https://clojure.org/reference/libs https://clojure.org/reference/libs
      • microcolonel 6y ago
        > Even your way has two completely different code paths (import vs require) to bring in dependencies. import and require have different purposes though, it makes perfect sense to me that they are separate. Import, here, is used to import Java classes, which don't hook into Clojure's namespaces directly; require is for bringing in symbols from Clojure namespaces. In general, a beginner or intermediate Clojure user will not touch the :import feature at all, nor the :use feature. > It is really sloppy and confusing to learn. That's one opinion of it I guess; though in my experience, the way that I do it is very common in publicly-visible Clojure modules. I've been doing it the same way since day one, without issue. There may be other ways, but you don't really need to care about them. With this you'll understand most modules you come across, and you'll be able to accomplish basically anything you'll want to. Given the average completeness of documentation on publicly-visible packages (though to be fair most big ones have what most would consider adequate documentation) including the core, you're going to have lots of opportunities to read other people's modules, and these minutiae will fade into obscurity and be overshadowed by your own program's problem space.
  • didibus 6y ago
    > I'm not aware of any Clojure tools that are best-of-breed for project management. Java has a better model for locking everything down (or maybe how the Linux Distros manage their repositories) Uh? Clojure locks everything down as a well. In fact, deps.edn solves many issues experienced with Maven. Personally, I've found Clojure dependency management to be the best I've ever used in any language. It's simple, explicit, gets out of your way, and lets you just do your work. > and Python has a better model for just keeping up with the current state of things. I'd like to hear about this? Pip doesn't even have a command to update all dependencies in one go. And figuring what even are the dependencies of any given project is a mess.