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I've done Ruby for years and I've written one large commercial project in clojure. Clojure was great, and I would love to use it more, but I haven't been able t

by jshen 15y ago

I've done Ruby for years and I've written one large commercial project in clojure. Clojure was great, and I would love to use it more, but I haven't been able to convince people to use a lisp. It's very strange actually, I tried really hard to do a small project in clojure at my current job and got resistance from everyone. These same people were happy to try coffee script, scala, golang, etc, etc. There seems to be a true bias against lisps.

phren0logy 15y ago
That's really interesting to hear a real-world example. Can you say more about the reasons they gave you?
- jshen 15y ago
  The contexts are all different. A VP told me that he had a bunch of mediocre programs and it would be hard from them to use it, and hard to hire new programmers. A friend of mine who tries new languages all the time simply doesn't like it cause it's a lisp. A Director at a different company didn't say clearly, but it seemed to boil down to it being a lisp. H was fine with us trying Scala or even golang, but no clojure.
jcromartie 15y ago
People see parens and freak out. I once interviewed a guy who said his least favorite language was Lisp. I didn't know it was at the bottom of anybody's list!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kylecordes 15y ago
Oddly, the thing that triggers ire seems to be the presence of a left paren at the start of a line. (Many constructs in Clojure involve fewer parens than the same construct in Java, so the mere number of parens is therefore not a reason to avoid Clojure.)
wooby 15y ago
Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk from Strange Loop is filled with great ammo: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy Personally, it gave me new vocabulary and conceptual tools for explaining why I like Clojure so much.
devin 15y ago
Personally, all I can say is: Other people can choose to accept or reject parentheses. As people who know and understand the power and inherent elegance of the language we need to skip the step where we yearn for recognition and go straight to the "doing really fantastic stuff and making you jealous" portion of the narrative. We dote too much on the history of Lisp w/r/t Clojure IMO. Clojure is not CL. Clojure is not Scheme. Clojure is not Haskell. Clojure is Clojure. It has its own state, identity, and time. Make great stuff with it and other people will follow. My feeling is that was need to quit waiting for approval and simply draw the line in the sand. I would be happy to forfeit future programming job opportunities if it meant committing to a language that solves the problems I care about. Will everyone do that? Unlikely. Will the people who know better than to settle for second best do it? I have a feeling the answer there is closer to yes.
- moomin 15y ago
  The joke is, David Wheeler demonstrated years ago that you don't need most of the parens: http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html It wouldn't be too hard to develop an indentation-based dialect of Clojure.
  - nickik 15y ago
    This is well known and has allready been done for clojure (cant remember where I saw it). There are problems with this syntax when you combine it with macros. There is some work done to solve this but not much. For a (theoretical) lisp that works this way, see here: http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/ http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/

by jshen 15y ago

phren0logy 15y ago

That's really interesting to hear a real-world example. Can you say more about the reasons they gave you?

jshen 15y ago
The contexts are all different. A VP told me that he had a bunch of mediocre programs and it would be hard from them to use it, and hard to hire new programmers. A friend of mine who tries new languages all the time simply doesn't like it cause it's a lisp. A Director at a different company didn't say clearly, but it seemed to boil down to it being a lisp. H was fine with us trying Scala or even golang, but no clojure.

jcromartie 15y ago

People see parens and freak out. I once interviewed a guy who said his least favorite language was Lisp. I didn't know it was at the bottom of anybody's list!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

kylecordes 15y ago

Oddly, the thing that triggers ire seems to be the presence of a left paren at the start of a line. (Many constructs in Clojure involve fewer parens than the same construct in Java, so the mere number of parens is therefore not a reason to avoid Clojure.)

wooby 15y ago

Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk from Strange Loop is filled with great ammo: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy Personally, it gave me new vocabulary and conceptual tools for explaining why I like Clojure so much.

devin 15y ago

Personally, all I can say is: Other people can choose to accept or reject parentheses. As people who know and understand the power and inherent elegance of the language we need to skip the step where we yearn for recognition and go straight to the "doing really fantastic stuff and making you jealous" portion of the narrative. We dote too much on the history of Lisp w/r/t Clojure IMO. Clojure is not CL. Clojure is not Scheme. Clojure is not Haskell. Clojure is Clojure. It has its own state, identity, and time. Make great stuff with it and other people will follow. My feeling is that was need to quit waiting for approval and simply draw the line in the sand. I would be happy to forfeit future programming job opportunities if it meant committing to a language that solves the problems I care about. Will everyone do that? Unlikely. Will the people who know better than to settle for second best do it? I have a feeling the answer there is closer to yes.

moomin 15y ago
The joke is, David Wheeler demonstrated years ago that you don't need most of the parens: http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html It wouldn't be too hard to develop an indentation-based dialect of Clojure.
- nickik 15y ago
  This is well known and has allready been done for clojure (cant remember where I saw it). There are problems with this syntax when you combine it with macros. There is some work done to solve this but not much. For a (theoretical) lisp that works this way, see here: http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/ http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/