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The line which sprung out most to me was the one claiming that "Clojure took the world by storm". This is simply not the case. JavaScript has taken the world by

by WJW 6y ago

The line which sprung out most to me was the one claiming that "Clojure took the world by storm". This is simply not the case. JavaScript has taken the world by storm, as has Python. Ruby, PHP and others have taken the world by storm before and are slowly fading. Clojure has never taken the world by storm and (IMO) never will. Neither will Haskell btw. To me, Clojure is very much on the same level as Haskell: an extremely niche programming language with a small (sub-1% in TIOBE) but dedicated following that is unlikely to grow much beyond what it already is. Rest of the article: meh. It presupposes a lot of what it thinks Haskell should aspire to without investigating whether those things are actually what it is aspiring to be.

ImprobableTruth 6y ago
The entire article just reads like a badly regurgitated Hickey talk.
thom 6y ago
Yeah, I think Clojure people have a lot of insecurity around Haskell and it’s rarely a good look. Clojure is a language of sensible compromises without any real philosophical slam dunks, which doesn’t seem to satiate engineers’ natural desire to win internet points.
- iLemming 6y ago
  > Clojure people have a lot of insecurity around Haskell I beg to differ. I think it's the other way around. I rarely see Clojure folk bashing on Haskell - they usually admit Haskell's strong points or any other language. They very often borrow ideas from other languages, libraries, and tools. I've heard they are figuring out interop with Python and R. They've built Clojure-like Lisp dialects that work on Golang, Erlang, compile to Lua, etc. Haskellites, however, get sad and defensive anytime someone mentions that it's not so widely used in the real world.
  - travv0 6y ago
    That’s a nice thought, but I haven’t seen examples of that myself. And your claim of real-world use seems to be the opposite of what I found with a quick Google search: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-20/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2... https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Obviously this is far from scientific, but Clojure being a new, hyped language, it wouldn’t surprise me if that skewed people’s perception of how much it was used in production code.
    - fnordsensei 6y ago
      I feel like at this point, it's neither new (coming up on 12 years old) nor hyped (it's been used in anger a lot by now). I'm not sure how you read real-world utility from looking at graphs of SO and GitHub. It's like claiming that garbage trucks have no real-world utility because they are vastly less popular than cars. Clojure is hovering around the same space as Rust, and beating WASM and Cuda. All of these languages occupy a useful niche, and a more-than-cursory search will reveal a lot of companies deploying them where they can play to their respective strengths.
iLemming 6y ago
I think you are ignoring the facts: Clojure at the moment is the most widely used programming language with a strong FP emphasis. Clojure gathers more conferences and meetups, has more active podcasts, books, jobs, etc. Many companies are using Clojure in production: Apple, Walmart Labs, Cisco, Pandora, CircleCI, Roamresearch, Grammarly, Pitch - are just a few that come to mind. And they're not using it for the small stuff; for example, Cisco has built its entire security platform with it. Clojure is the third most popular JVM lang. To be fair though, this is mainly due to Kotlin taking over Scala. Also, Clojure probably is the second most popular lisp dialect on GitHub (after Emacs-lisp). So I think the claim is correct. At least within the FP world - Clojure currently dominates over Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala, Elixir, Erlang, etc.
- WJW 6y ago
  Are you not just moving the goalposts? The original article was "took the world by storm", not "took the FP world by storm". As part of the wider programming world FP languages are a tiny minority, regardless of how many impressive companies we rattle off. JS and Python absolutely rule the roost at the moment.
  - fnordsensei 6y ago
    I read it as an emotional outburst by the author, and I don't think it actually contains any information relevant to the rest of the article. If we wanted to treat it as an argument, we'd have to nail down the parameters for what "taking the world by storm" means objectively, or the author would have to clarify what they meant subjectively.
- travv0 6y ago
  You claim that they’re ignoring facts, but provide no facts of your own beyond “some companies use it in production,” which is undoubtably also true of Haskell.
  - iLemming 6y ago
    > but provide no facts - more active podcasts: https://www.fpcasts.com/ https://www.fpcasts.com/ - more conferences: https://purelyfunctional.tv/functional-programming-conferences/ https://purelyfunctional.tv/functional-programming-conferenc... - more books: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Clojure https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Clojure - more companies: https://clojure.org/community/companies https://clojure.org/community/companies - more jobs: https://www.google.com/search?q=functional+programming+jobs https://www.google.com/search?q=functional+programming+jobs I've maintained an active interest in FP languages over the past several years. I'm not arguing here about the merits of choosing Haskell over Clojure, etc., or about other blogpost opinions (I'm afraid I have to disagree with many of them). I'm merely sharing what I know about the current state of FP in the industry.

by WJW 6y ago

ImprobableTruth 6y ago

The entire article just reads like a badly regurgitated Hickey talk.

thom 6y ago

Yeah, I think Clojure people have a lot of insecurity around Haskell and it’s rarely a good look. Clojure is a language of sensible compromises without any real philosophical slam dunks, which doesn’t seem to satiate engineers’ natural desire to win internet points.

iLemming 6y ago
> Clojure people have a lot of insecurity around Haskell I beg to differ. I think it's the other way around. I rarely see Clojure folk bashing on Haskell - they usually admit Haskell's strong points or any other language. They very often borrow ideas from other languages, libraries, and tools. I've heard they are figuring out interop with Python and R. They've built Clojure-like Lisp dialects that work on Golang, Erlang, compile to Lua, etc. Haskellites, however, get sad and defensive anytime someone mentions that it's not so widely used in the real world.
- travv0 6y ago
  That’s a nice thought, but I haven’t seen examples of that myself. And your claim of real-world use seems to be the opposite of what I found with a quick Google search: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-20/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2... https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 Obviously this is far from scientific, but Clojure being a new, hyped language, it wouldn’t surprise me if that skewed people’s perception of how much it was used in production code.
  - fnordsensei 6y ago
    I feel like at this point, it's neither new (coming up on 12 years old) nor hyped (it's been used in anger a lot by now). I'm not sure how you read real-world utility from looking at graphs of SO and GitHub. It's like claiming that garbage trucks have no real-world utility because they are vastly less popular than cars. Clojure is hovering around the same space as Rust, and beating WASM and Cuda. All of these languages occupy a useful niche, and a more-than-cursory search will reveal a lot of companies deploying them where they can play to their respective strengths.

iLemming 6y ago

I think you are ignoring the facts: Clojure at the moment is the most widely used programming language with a strong FP emphasis. Clojure gathers more conferences and meetups, has more active podcasts, books, jobs, etc. Many companies are using Clojure in production: Apple, Walmart Labs, Cisco, Pandora, CircleCI, Roamresearch, Grammarly, Pitch - are just a few that come to mind. And they're not using it for the small stuff; for example, Cisco has built its entire security platform with it. Clojure is the third most popular JVM lang. To be fair though, this is mainly due to Kotlin taking over Scala. Also, Clojure probably is the second most popular lisp dialect on GitHub (after Emacs-lisp). So I think the claim is correct. At least within the FP world - Clojure currently dominates over Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala, Elixir, Erlang, etc.

WJW 6y ago
Are you not just moving the goalposts? The original article was "took the world by storm", not "took the FP world by storm". As part of the wider programming world FP languages are a tiny minority, regardless of how many impressive companies we rattle off. JS and Python absolutely rule the roost at the moment.
- fnordsensei 6y ago
  I read it as an emotional outburst by the author, and I don't think it actually contains any information relevant to the rest of the article. If we wanted to treat it as an argument, we'd have to nail down the parameters for what "taking the world by storm" means objectively, or the author would have to clarify what they meant subjectively.
travv0 6y ago
You claim that they’re ignoring facts, but provide no facts of your own beyond “some companies use it in production,” which is undoubtably also true of Haskell.
- iLemming 6y ago
  > but provide no facts - more active podcasts: https://www.fpcasts.com/ https://www.fpcasts.com/ - more conferences: https://purelyfunctional.tv/functional-programming-conferences/ https://purelyfunctional.tv/functional-programming-conferenc... - more books: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Clojure https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Clojure - more companies: https://clojure.org/community/companies https://clojure.org/community/companies - more jobs: https://www.google.com/search?q=functional+programming+jobs https://www.google.com/search?q=functional+programming+jobs I've maintained an active interest in FP languages over the past several years. I'm not arguing here about the merits of choosing Haskell over Clojure, etc., or about other blogpost opinions (I'm afraid I have to disagree with many of them). I'm merely sharing what I know about the current state of FP in the industry.