5 ms·

Thoughts on Clojure Hacking

47 points by sbochins 16y ago

kmfrk 16y ago
I'm sorry that this might be the wrong place to ask, but why is sbochins's name coloured green? Is it because I've upvoted him a lot - or he me? How does it look for other people?
- mcav 16y ago
  It's a new account. (think "Oh, he's green at that")
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    Ah, I see. I thought it was a reference to the red-green colour metaphor of + and -, friend and foe, and so forth.
- shadowpwner 16y ago
  Should we be drawing more or less attention to newcomers? The green is more obvious than the default gray.
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    I think it's ironic to draw attention to newcomers' submissions - and it might be something that malefactors would look into gaming. On the other hand, the point of such features has always been to emulate the "I'm new in traffic - cut me some slack and keep an extra eye out for me" bumper sticker. And this outweighs the con, to me. But it's something that's only been done on forums - bulletin boards if you will. As old as it seems, it looks like a novel approach by pg in the comments site medium.
- sbochins 16y ago
  Have been a long time reader, just signed up a few days ago. Was wondering what the green meant at first too.
choffstein 16y ago
Looks green to me Also, front page? Wow. Must be a slow day on Hacker News, huh? I'm honored, but I don't really think the article has the "substance" to justify a front page ranking.
- runevault 16y ago
  Clojure articles seem to draw a lot of upvotes by default, to the point of silliness. I love Clojure but it's kind of bizarre how fast they draw upvotes here, since it isn't a Clojure site.
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    pg is a bit of a Messiah to some Lisp folks. (One of the few who's had commercial success, wrote On Lisp, kept the dream alive...) HN also likes cool new tech. I'm not surprised that people like Clojure, although I agree that some more restraint wouldn't be bad.
  - swannodette 16y ago
    HN is a Lisp friendly place and many fluffy Lisp related things make it to the front page on HN, not just Clojure (and this article is not nearly as fluffy as some of the things that make it :) But I agree, it would be nice if people submitting Clojure articles would submit meatier stuff. Same could be said of the recent Node.js HN contingent. On a related note, one thing I've noticed is that the Node.js troupe seems to flag negative Node.js content - this kind of cargo-cult is a bad sign of where things are going on HN IMO.
    - runevault 16y ago
      Agreed on both counts. I truly love Clojure (and I use your Enlive tutorial any time I need a refresher) but if it's nothing new why does it need a hojillion upvotes. I'll be curious to see what the effect of pg's changes are on such issues, if anything. I do wonder if seperating saved stories from upvotes might help, since some people may see clojure and use upvote to flag it for later reading.
  - 16y ago
m0th87 16y ago
How is Clojure debugging now? Last I checked, I couldn't get a reliable stack trace, and the advice I read online said "just step through it" or use somesuch tool, which is presumably not very helpful when you're trying to figure out why an hour-long application unexpectedly crashed. That was enough to scare me away.
- jshen 16y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "reliable stack trace", but I've been doing clojure full time for the past 6 months or so. Our program needs to stay up and it is heavily threaded. In this context I haven't had any problems with stack traces and my app fits your description of hours long run time and some crashes.
- runevault 16y ago
  There are still thick stack traces by default, but there are tools to help now. http://clojure.org/libraries#Clojure%20Libraries-Category:%20xml-clojure.contrib.stacktrace http://clojure.org/libraries#Clojure%20Libraries-Category:%2...
- sbochins 16y ago
  Never knew there was an issue with stack traces in Clojure. I only started programming in it several months ago. From what I've found, its much easier to wade through stack traces in Clojure. You can break out at different points in the stack and have a running repl with that environment. I've found this to be very helpful with debugging.
tmountain 16y ago
A minor quibble from the post, but instead of doing this: cat $(find . -name "*.clj") > clojure.lisp you can avoid the temporary file by doing this: find . -name "*.clj" | xargs wc -l
- technomancy 16y ago
  wc doesn't leave out comments and newlines.
  - tmountain 16y ago
    Oh, I see. He's running sloccount on the resulting file. My mistake.

47 points by sbochins 16y ago

kmfrk 16y ago

I'm sorry that this might be the wrong place to ask, but why is sbochins's name coloured green? Is it because I've upvoted him a lot - or he me? How does it look for other people?

mcav 16y ago
It's a new account. (think "Oh, he's green at that")
- kmfrk 16y ago
  Ah, I see. I thought it was a reference to the red-green colour metaphor of + and -, friend and foe, and so forth.
shadowpwner 16y ago
Should we be drawing more or less attention to newcomers? The green is more obvious than the default gray.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  I think it's ironic to draw attention to newcomers' submissions - and it might be something that malefactors would look into gaming. On the other hand, the point of such features has always been to emulate the "I'm new in traffic - cut me some slack and keep an extra eye out for me" bumper sticker. And this outweighs the con, to me. But it's something that's only been done on forums - bulletin boards if you will. As old as it seems, it looks like a novel approach by pg in the comments site medium.
sbochins 16y ago
Have been a long time reader, just signed up a few days ago. Was wondering what the green meant at first too.

choffstein 16y ago

Looks green to me Also, front page? Wow. Must be a slow day on Hacker News, huh? I'm honored, but I don't really think the article has the "substance" to justify a front page ranking.

runevault 16y ago
Clojure articles seem to draw a lot of upvotes by default, to the point of silliness. I love Clojure but it's kind of bizarre how fast they draw upvotes here, since it isn't a Clojure site.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  pg is a bit of a Messiah to some Lisp folks. (One of the few who's had commercial success, wrote On Lisp, kept the dream alive...) HN also likes cool new tech. I'm not surprised that people like Clojure, although I agree that some more restraint wouldn't be bad.
- swannodette 16y ago
  HN is a Lisp friendly place and many fluffy Lisp related things make it to the front page on HN, not just Clojure (and this article is not nearly as fluffy as some of the things that make it :) But I agree, it would be nice if people submitting Clojure articles would submit meatier stuff. Same could be said of the recent Node.js HN contingent. On a related note, one thing I've noticed is that the Node.js troupe seems to flag negative Node.js content - this kind of cargo-cult is a bad sign of where things are going on HN IMO.
  - runevault 16y ago
    Agreed on both counts. I truly love Clojure (and I use your Enlive tutorial any time I need a refresher) but if it's nothing new why does it need a hojillion upvotes. I'll be curious to see what the effect of pg's changes are on such issues, if anything. I do wonder if seperating saved stories from upvotes might help, since some people may see clojure and use upvote to flag it for later reading.
- 16y ago

m0th87 16y ago

How is Clojure debugging now? Last I checked, I couldn't get a reliable stack trace, and the advice I read online said "just step through it" or use somesuch tool, which is presumably not very helpful when you're trying to figure out why an hour-long application unexpectedly crashed. That was enough to scare me away.

jshen 16y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "reliable stack trace", but I've been doing clojure full time for the past 6 months or so. Our program needs to stay up and it is heavily threaded. In this context I haven't had any problems with stack traces and my app fits your description of hours long run time and some crashes.
runevault 16y ago
There are still thick stack traces by default, but there are tools to help now. http://clojure.org/libraries#Clojure%20Libraries-Category:%20xml-clojure.contrib.stacktrace http://clojure.org/libraries#Clojure%20Libraries-Category:%2...
sbochins 16y ago
Never knew there was an issue with stack traces in Clojure. I only started programming in it several months ago. From what I've found, its much easier to wade through stack traces in Clojure. You can break out at different points in the stack and have a running repl with that environment. I've found this to be very helpful with debugging.

tmountain 16y ago

A minor quibble from the post, but instead of doing this: cat $(find . -name "*.clj") > clojure.lisp you can avoid the temporary file by doing this: find . -name "*.clj" | xargs wc -l

technomancy 16y ago
wc doesn't leave out comments and newlines.
- tmountain 16y ago
  Oh, I see. He's running sloccount on the resulting file. My mistake.