3 ms·

I think you've answered you're own question here, in a sense. Erlang was created by Ericson for use in telecom systems. (OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform)

I think you've answered you're own question here, in a sense. Erlang was created by Ericson for use in telecom systems. (OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform) which gives credence to the idea that Erlang didn't need a Rails. Once Elixir came along, being a bit more general purpose, people started building those things. Clojure, from the beginning, was intended to be a general purpose language, not a web language. So I think it would be fine to expect Clojure to be able to solve non-web type problems. Maybe the community has attrition, but I don't think so. The Clojurians slack seems bigger than it ever was, more companies are using Clojure than I've ever seen. edit: general not generate

troutwine 4y ago
Minor quibble, OTP _used_ to stand for Open Telecom Platform but that acronym was removed in the push to open-source. Ericson had hoped to sell the Open Telecom Platform to other telecoms but that didn't work out, hence the modern Erlang/OTP. Anyhow, Erlang's niche was and is fault-tolerant middleware, yeah, the kind of thing you see deep in the bowels of systems. The community built up a sizable bulk of code to support the kind of middleware you'd find in Enterprise-y type places in the early 2000s and then slowly started to fall off, leaving an ecosystem that slowly bit-rotted in much the same way you describe in your article. That, specifically, is what I'm referring to as the off-the-shelf rot problem. Perhaps I could have been more clear. I agree with the argument that Clojure was intended to be a general purpose kind of language, but I think you article also suggests that -- unless you're tied to a JVM model _and_ you refuse to use Java -- that Clojure gets out-competed by languages like Go in that kind of work. It's not clear to me how or why building a Rails kind of thing for Clojure would reverse this situation. I think, also, the size of an online community and tally of companies can be misleading. Erlang's IRC and company use was at an all-time high even while the actual pool of developers had reached its peak and was declining, slowly but surely. It's argument from analogy, sure, but what you're describing in the article for Clojure looks damn familiar from my time with Erlang, pre-Elixir.
dustingetz 4y ago
> Clojure, from the beginning, was intended to be a general purpose language, not a web language i don’t think that is strictly true, clojure is for “situated programs” which is basically a perfect description of cloud information systems and user interfaces. immutability and macros is not what you want for games, for example. and data science is very SQL/struct oriented, it doesn’t hit clojure’s high notes. mobile is very platform interop heavy and best done natively without adding intermediate abstraction layers. databases are written in lower level langs for performance (Datomic is not known for lightning fast queries). what’s left?

troutwine 4y ago

Minor quibble, OTP _used_ to stand for Open Telecom Platform but that acronym was removed in the push to open-source. Ericson had hoped to sell the Open Telecom Platform to other telecoms but that didn't work out, hence the modern Erlang/OTP. Anyhow, Erlang's niche was and is fault-tolerant middleware, yeah, the kind of thing you see deep in the bowels of systems. The community built up a sizable bulk of code to support the kind of middleware you'd find in Enterprise-y type places in the early 2000s and then slowly started to fall off, leaving an ecosystem that slowly bit-rotted in much the same way you describe in your article. That, specifically, is what I'm referring to as the off-the-shelf rot problem. Perhaps I could have been more clear. I agree with the argument that Clojure was intended to be a general purpose kind of language, but I think you article also suggests that -- unless you're tied to a JVM model _and_ you refuse to use Java -- that Clojure gets out-competed by languages like Go in that kind of work. It's not clear to me how or why building a Rails kind of thing for Clojure would reverse this situation. I think, also, the size of an online community and tally of companies can be misleading. Erlang's IRC and company use was at an all-time high even while the actual pool of developers had reached its peak and was declining, slowly but surely. It's argument from analogy, sure, but what you're describing in the article for Clojure looks damn familiar from my time with Erlang, pre-Elixir.

dustingetz 4y ago

> Clojure, from the beginning, was intended to be a general purpose language, not a web language i don’t think that is strictly true, clojure is for “situated programs” which is basically a perfect description of cloud information systems and user interfaces. immutability and macros is not what you want for games, for example. and data science is very SQL/struct oriented, it doesn’t hit clojure’s high notes. mobile is very platform interop heavy and best done natively without adding intermediate abstraction layers. databases are written in lower level langs for performance (Datomic is not known for lightning fast queries). what’s left?