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So it turns out that Clojure is the ultimate data-wrangling tool yet there's no chance of earning a living with it. So much for innovation. Technology is a stra

by cutler 6y ago

So it turns out that Clojure is the ultimate data-wrangling tool yet there's no chance of earning a living with it. So much for innovation. Technology is a strange industry where conservative Java bondage and a 2-bit browser scripting extension with no stdlib reign supreme.

wellpast 6y ago
Clojure’s just a Java library, friend.
- cutler 6y ago
  I wonder how many fanfold pages of Java, complete with getters, setters, toString and hashCode, one of Nathan's examples expands into?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
hota_mazi 6y ago
Clojure is wholly inadequate to meeting challenges of the industry today. Not just because it's dynamically typed (which means tooling for it is close to nonexistent and it has terrible performance), but also because its ecosystem is a ghost town. It takes more than just a language to create a productive development environment in 2020, especially one which is so flawed by designed to the point of not even being statically typed.
- wellpast 6y ago
  Your Google skills must be short. Clojure community is on fire with open-source and it’s IDE and build support is copious and stellar. Also it’s not statically typed on purpose; the reasons for this have been described & analyzed at length. I’d recommend you get out more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dunefox 6y ago
  Yeah, just like Common Lisp and Julia have terrible performance. Extremely slow, can't do anything with them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- iLemming 6y ago
  > Clojure is wholly inadequate to meeting challenges of the industry today Interesting point. Sadly, it seems engineers at Apple, Cisco, Walmart, NASA, CircleCI, Pandora, Grammarly, Funding Circle, Nubank and hundreds of other companies are amateurs who don't know jack-shit about challenges in the industry and keep building their sand-castles using their incredibly flawed tools. I'm sure, these losers would soon vanish from the radar and we would never hear about them. Just give it a few years.
smrtinsert 6y ago
Not really. I put together a few github projects and was approached about two jobs over a few years just under 200k... I said no, because even though my github projects were simple when I wrote them, reading them later was insane. Reopening my java projects after years is the exact opposite - my IDE tells me everything I need to know and reminds me along the way. It's like a warm fuzzy blanket. I'm almost 99% sure both jobs were places that bought into some dynamic developer who promised unicorns and rainbows and then left them with a huge clojure project have their eyes bleed to. No thanks.
devin 6y ago
This is totally incorrect. Join the Clojurians slack and ask around about work. There's plenty opportunity out there. Apple, WalMart, DRW Trading, NuBank, Capital One, and the list goes on and on.
- cutler 6y ago
  There are always a few outliers for any language but when you look at a larger sample Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable. Take contract roles on IT Jobswatch, for example. 12 conracts in the last 6 months in the whole of London and 1 in the rest of the UK compared with Scala for which there were 279 in London and 128 in the rest of the UK. I'm not a Scala fanboy either. I remember back in 2013 when Clojure was hot and Clojure meetups in London were well-attended. Those days are over. London Clojurians has struggled to attract a handful of attendees since long before the COVID19 crisis.
  - iLemming 6y ago
    > Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable What... are.. you.. talking... about? Do some googling around. Clojure today is the most popular in its category of the languages with strong FP emphasis and slowly and steadily growing. It has already generated more jobs, books, active podcasts, conferences. More than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elm, Purescript, Erlang, Elixir, Idris, Julia, and has recently surpassed Scala and become 3rd most used JVM language after Java and Kotlin. Of course, one can say: "actually, none of these have gained much adoption in the industry", and speaking in relative numbers, they'd be right. But those who can no longer bear the pain of writing awful, deeply nested Java class hierarchies or tired of debugging concurrency issues would always find projects to write and sometimes even get paid for, using their preferred tool. I honestly don't understand people, when they say: "It's really nice, I love it, but I'm getting paid to use something else." Well, do you really expect someone to call you and say: "Hey, I saw your comment on HN, it seems you'd love to use Clojure, can we offer you a lot of money?", or something like that? I for one, after only a week of playing with Clojure, immediately quit my job. It took me just a few days to find a Clojure gig. I switched jobs three times since then, never (even during the COVID-19 crisis, when I was laid off) was a question for me "Is the fun over? Do I have to start looking for Python jobs now?" Luck of course is a factor, but you have to herd, guide and push your luck forward. It's no one's fault that you are forced to use something you don't like.

by cutler 6y ago

wellpast 6y ago

Clojure’s just a Java library, friend.

cutler 6y ago
I wonder how many fanfold pages of Java, complete with getters, setters, toString and hashCode, one of Nathan's examples expands into?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

hota_mazi 6y ago

Clojure is wholly inadequate to meeting challenges of the industry today. Not just because it's dynamically typed (which means tooling for it is close to nonexistent and it has terrible performance), but also because its ecosystem is a ghost town. It takes more than just a language to create a productive development environment in 2020, especially one which is so flawed by designed to the point of not even being statically typed.

wellpast 6y ago
Your Google skills must be short. Clojure community is on fire with open-source and it’s IDE and build support is copious and stellar. Also it’s not statically typed on purpose; the reasons for this have been described & analyzed at length. I’d recommend you get out more.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dunefox 6y ago
Yeah, just like Common Lisp and Julia have terrible performance. Extremely slow, can't do anything with them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
iLemming 6y ago
> Clojure is wholly inadequate to meeting challenges of the industry today Interesting point. Sadly, it seems engineers at Apple, Cisco, Walmart, NASA, CircleCI, Pandora, Grammarly, Funding Circle, Nubank and hundreds of other companies are amateurs who don't know jack-shit about challenges in the industry and keep building their sand-castles using their incredibly flawed tools. I'm sure, these losers would soon vanish from the radar and we would never hear about them. Just give it a few years.

smrtinsert 6y ago

Not really. I put together a few github projects and was approached about two jobs over a few years just under 200k... I said no, because even though my github projects were simple when I wrote them, reading them later was insane. Reopening my java projects after years is the exact opposite - my IDE tells me everything I need to know and reminds me along the way. It's like a warm fuzzy blanket. I'm almost 99% sure both jobs were places that bought into some dynamic developer who promised unicorns and rainbows and then left them with a huge clojure project have their eyes bleed to. No thanks.

devin 6y ago

This is totally incorrect. Join the Clojurians slack and ask around about work. There's plenty opportunity out there. Apple, WalMart, DRW Trading, NuBank, Capital One, and the list goes on and on.

cutler 6y ago
There are always a few outliers for any language but when you look at a larger sample Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable. Take contract roles on IT Jobswatch, for example. 12 conracts in the last 6 months in the whole of London and 1 in the rest of the UK compared with Scala for which there were 279 in London and 128 in the rest of the UK. I'm not a Scala fanboy either. I remember back in 2013 when Clojure was hot and Clojure meetups in London were well-attended. Those days are over. London Clojurians has struggled to attract a handful of attendees since long before the COVID19 crisis.
- iLemming 6y ago
  > Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable What... are.. you.. talking... about? Do some googling around. Clojure today is the most popular in its category of the languages with strong FP emphasis and slowly and steadily growing. It has already generated more jobs, books, active podcasts, conferences. More than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elm, Purescript, Erlang, Elixir, Idris, Julia, and has recently surpassed Scala and become 3rd most used JVM language after Java and Kotlin. Of course, one can say: "actually, none of these have gained much adoption in the industry", and speaking in relative numbers, they'd be right. But those who can no longer bear the pain of writing awful, deeply nested Java class hierarchies or tired of debugging concurrency issues would always find projects to write and sometimes even get paid for, using their preferred tool. I honestly don't understand people, when they say: "It's really nice, I love it, but I'm getting paid to use something else." Well, do you really expect someone to call you and say: "Hey, I saw your comment on HN, it seems you'd love to use Clojure, can we offer you a lot of money?", or something like that? I for one, after only a week of playing with Clojure, immediately quit my job. It took me just a few days to find a Clojure gig. I switched jobs three times since then, never (even during the COVID-19 crisis, when I was laid off) was a question for me "Is the fun over? Do I have to start looking for Python jobs now?" Luck of course is a factor, but you have to herd, guide and push your luck forward. It's no one's fault that you are forced to use something you don't like.