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I think languages by themselves rarely become popular. There is some killer feature that a language offers which makes a certain class of problems very easy to

I think languages by themselves rarely become popular. There is some killer feature that a language offers which makes a certain class of problems very easy to solve. For example, Rails did it for Ruby, Go's stdlib makes it very easy to write performant network services, Java's promise of platform-independent code, huge stdlib and a free compiler and (later) free IDEs when almost all other compilers and IDEs were paid, C# - Microsoft's deeply integrated ecosystem, Rust's memory safety and the promise of fearless concurrency. Functional languages are lacking such killer features which makes them 10x more productive for widely faced problems. I am learning Clojure to learn more about the functional paradigm, but I don't see any particular type of software that I could do with it which I couldn't achieve with Java, Go, JS or Python all of which I already know well enough.

nilkn 6y ago
I think you could argue that type-safe STM is such a feature for Haskell. It's something that I really miss when using threads or async essentially anywhere else. I would probably jump for Haskell over Rust as a result for heavily concurrent or multithreaded programs. Rust is memory safe, but it can't express purity and it can't enforce that STM transactions should be safely retryable. I would also argue that Elm offers close to a 10x factor for certain types of front-end web applications. It's a very closed system, which is a matter of great controversy, but in areas where you can exist within that system it is a dramatic leap forward compared to anything else in my experience. If you consider Erlang/Elixir functional languages, I would argue that BEAM can offer close to a 10x factor for certain types of distributed or concurrent applications as well. You mentioned Clojure, though, and I don't know what the killer 10x feature would be there.
dnautics 6y ago
I suggest trying elixir instead of clojure. Webdev is extremely productive in it. There's also a new reactive web framework called Phoenix liveview that's eye-poppingly powerful. (Yes you can do similar things with blazor but I promise you when something goes wrong with your blazor code you will have either a security regression or a hair tearing out session because it's relatively hard to grok what c# is doing under to hood to transform your code)
deleted 6y ago
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didibus 6y ago
I partially agree, but I wouldn't say: "a certain class of problems very easy to solve". Instead I'd say: "which have a product that first delivers on a new market use case". As someone who loves Clojure, I make this correction, because for example, Clojure has no such product, and in that sense it isn't very popular. Yet I can still use it to solve many class of problems easily and often faster than it takes me in other languages. For example, Ruby got big because it delivered on a new kind of web framework just at the time they were becoming popular. Go became popular only because it has a runtime with more modern tuning, prioritizing responsiveness over performance just when that started to become the new priority due to the shift to software as a service. Python became popular only once it gave rise to NumPy and the plethora of data-science libs it offers. Java became popular because it delivered on the first enterprise grade virtual machine. JavaScript because it was embedded in the browser. Etc. Which takes me back to Clojure. Since you say you are learning it. I'd say for me Clojure's special in that it focuses not on any product as such, but instead on the language itself. Using it is more about one's enjoyment and productivity. The key part is, it gives this enhanced language while letting you choose what existing product you want to use it with. That's the hosted nature of it. In that sense, it provides a more enjoyable interface to some of the best products. So you can use Clojure's better syntax, core functions and abstractions and language semantics and extensibility and expressiveness and interactivity with existing high quality products like everything the JVM or JS offers, with some extras like .Net, Erlang, subset of C++, etc. Disclaimer: I like Clojure, so am biased. Not everyone will find its syntax, functions, abstractions, interactivity, and expressivity to their liking, and if not, Clojure does not have a killer product and thus provide little value.

nilkn 6y ago

I think you could argue that type-safe STM is such a feature for Haskell. It's something that I really miss when using threads or async essentially anywhere else. I would probably jump for Haskell over Rust as a result for heavily concurrent or multithreaded programs. Rust is memory safe, but it can't express purity and it can't enforce that STM transactions should be safely retryable. I would also argue that Elm offers close to a 10x factor for certain types of front-end web applications. It's a very closed system, which is a matter of great controversy, but in areas where you can exist within that system it is a dramatic leap forward compared to anything else in my experience. If you consider Erlang/Elixir functional languages, I would argue that BEAM can offer close to a 10x factor for certain types of distributed or concurrent applications as well. You mentioned Clojure, though, and I don't know what the killer 10x feature would be there.

dnautics 6y ago

I suggest trying elixir instead of clojure. Webdev is extremely productive in it. There's also a new reactive web framework called Phoenix liveview that's eye-poppingly powerful. (Yes you can do similar things with blazor but I promise you when something goes wrong with your blazor code you will have either a security regression or a hair tearing out session because it's relatively hard to grok what c# is doing under to hood to transform your code)

deleted 6y ago

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didibus 6y ago

I partially agree, but I wouldn't say: "a certain class of problems very easy to solve". Instead I'd say: "which have a product that first delivers on a new market use case". As someone who loves Clojure, I make this correction, because for example, Clojure has no such product, and in that sense it isn't very popular. Yet I can still use it to solve many class of problems easily and often faster than it takes me in other languages. For example, Ruby got big because it delivered on a new kind of web framework just at the time they were becoming popular. Go became popular only because it has a runtime with more modern tuning, prioritizing responsiveness over performance just when that started to become the new priority due to the shift to software as a service. Python became popular only once it gave rise to NumPy and the plethora of data-science libs it offers. Java became popular because it delivered on the first enterprise grade virtual machine. JavaScript because it was embedded in the browser. Etc. Which takes me back to Clojure. Since you say you are learning it. I'd say for me Clojure's special in that it focuses not on any product as such, but instead on the language itself. Using it is more about one's enjoyment and productivity. The key part is, it gives this enhanced language while letting you choose what existing product you want to use it with. That's the hosted nature of it. In that sense, it provides a more enjoyable interface to some of the best products. So you can use Clojure's better syntax, core functions and abstractions and language semantics and extensibility and expressiveness and interactivity with existing high quality products like everything the JVM or JS offers, with some extras like .Net, Erlang, subset of C++, etc. Disclaimer: I like Clojure, so am biased. Not everyone will find its syntax, functions, abstractions, interactivity, and expressivity to their liking, and if not, Clojure does not have a killer product and thus provide little value.