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Aside, I remember HN in 2009 or so where Clojure was a daily homepage staple and Rich Hickey was putting out his talks about Clojure and code design. I watched

Aside, I remember HN in 2009 or so where Clojure was a daily homepage staple and Rich Hickey was putting out his talks about Clojure and code design. I watched a lot of that and used Clojure fulltime for five years. Wonder what he's up to these days.

xmlblog 4y ago
Attending https://2023.clojure-conj.org/schedule/ https://2023.clojure-conj.org/schedule/
- kgwxd 4y ago
  Oh, that's today and tomorrow. I had been waiting for that, I could have sworn earlier this year they said there was going to be a live stream available. Maybe it didn't pan out. Edit: Oh, there are streaming tickets for $20.
vaylian 4y ago
Probably spending a lot of time in hammocks[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
lib-dev 4y ago
Those talks inspired far more than Clojure itself. It sort of started this movement toward simplicity as a value.
- frou_dh 4y ago
  If that's the case then all the people running around praising the ""simplicity"" of golang got the wrong end of the stick completely from Rich's classic presentations.
  - moomin 4y ago
    The thing is, Hickey was entirely right to reject this idea of “Simplicity” being the same thing as “Easy”. But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics. Turns out if you really focus on composability above other concerns you get Haskell.
    - frou_dh 4y ago
      > But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics. Did he? I seem to remember a quip in one of the presentations about German not being comprehensible to him being his own problem, because he never learned German.
    - sooheon 4y ago
      In Hickey's world comprehensible is a subset of easy.
    - tikhonj 4y ago
      "Easy" vs "comprehensible" is exactly the trade-off Haskell makes: it might be difficult to learn, but it's easy to reason about once you learn it. (Of course, both sides of that equation come with their own caveats...)
    - KingMob 4y ago
      The problem is his disdain for "easy". It's one thing to create composable building blocks, but frequently, 99% of users will use them in the exact same way, so you might as well produce the easy thing on top of the simple thing, too. The Clojure tools.build process has this exact problem. It's too low-level, so everyone got to write their own build scripts on top of that to do the same thing as everyone else. Now there's a situation of a 1000s of bespoke build scripts and 3-4 different front-ends, all effectively doing the same thing. "In my line of work, sister, sometimes a second chance is a chance to mistake the same mistake twice" - State and Main
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
puredanger 4y ago
Working on Clojure and Datomic!
stonemetal12 4y ago
>used Clojure fulltime for five years. How did that work out for you? Usually following a hype cycle, there is a negative hype cycle i.e. Mongo is webscale, then Mongo is a buggy mess. Clojure seemed to just fade away. Did it turn out well or are there interesting pitfalls that make it not as great as advertised?
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Clojure is just really niche. Even an ecosystem that stays the same size overtime is dwarfed by the continually growing, continually polished competitor ecosystems that will pull people from the small niches. The best things about Clojure are things you don't really appreciate until you've already done the work to learn them. For example, I never would have known how amazing it was to evaluate code inside the editor until I did the work of learning Emacs + evil-mode + nrepl/cider + whatever so that I could spin up my http server in-process and then modify code without restarting everything. Even today I'm doing `nodemon index.ts` like a goofball. I stopped using Clojure simply when I met someone who wanted to build some big projects with me and, despite appreciating that Clojure was probably amazing, they simply couldn't be bothered to learn it. Fair enough. It was when Javascript was just getting `yield` coroutines (before async/await) which finally made Javascript bearable for me enough to switch to it for server work. Clojure just has increasingly compelling languages and ecosystems to compete with, yet it has a huge ramp up, being a lisp, that make it hard for people to choose it. Just consider how, to even write Clojure comfortably, you really need something like Paredit. Else, what exactly are you going to do if you want to nest or unnest a (form) deeper in the ast structure? Manually rebalance parens? Cut and paste it? Only Paredit lets you easily move a (form) around the ast. And it's amazing but yet another tool you have to learn just to truly evaluate Clojure.
  - gsinclair 4y ago
    Parinfer is also amazing but easier to get started with.
  - blatant303 4y ago
    You don't need paredit. I use Sublime and ctrl+shift+space. Been writing Clojure for 10 years or so.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
The whole clojure ecosystem and the wonderful tools around it never really took off due to unclear documentation, poor onboarding and too few evangelists. Datomic and other products are really cool but are now being given away as scrapware due to this lack of effort to make the whole ecosystem more palatable, colorful and easy to get into for new audiences.
- cellularmitosis 4y ago
  Even as a Clojure hobbyist I feel like all of these points are off? Between 4clojure, clojuredocs and the slack channel and the surprising number of books available, the onboarding and docs are great. And when I think of my favorite lang evangelists, hickey and nolen are absolutely #1 and #2, and have influenced me heavily, despite my day job not involving Clojure at all.

xmlblog 4y ago

Attending https://2023.clojure-conj.org/schedule/ https://2023.clojure-conj.org/schedule/

kgwxd 4y ago
Oh, that's today and tomorrow. I had been waiting for that, I could have sworn earlier this year they said there was going to be a live stream available. Maybe it didn't pan out. Edit: Oh, there are streaming tickets for $20.

vaylian 4y ago

Probably spending a lot of time in hammocks[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

lib-dev 4y ago

Those talks inspired far more than Clojure itself. It sort of started this movement toward simplicity as a value.

frou_dh 4y ago
If that's the case then all the people running around praising the ""simplicity"" of golang got the wrong end of the stick completely from Rich's classic presentations.
- moomin 4y ago
  The thing is, Hickey was entirely right to reject this idea of “Simplicity” being the same thing as “Easy”. But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics. Turns out if you really focus on composability above other concerns you get Haskell.
  - frou_dh 4y ago
    > But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics. Did he? I seem to remember a quip in one of the presentations about German not being comprehensible to him being his own problem, because he never learned German.
  - sooheon 4y ago
    In Hickey's world comprehensible is a subset of easy.
  - tikhonj 4y ago
    "Easy" vs "comprehensible" is exactly the trade-off Haskell makes: it might be difficult to learn, but it's easy to reason about once you learn it. (Of course, both sides of that equation come with their own caveats...)
  - KingMob 4y ago
    The problem is his disdain for "easy". It's one thing to create composable building blocks, but frequently, 99% of users will use them in the exact same way, so you might as well produce the easy thing on top of the simple thing, too. The Clojure tools.build process has this exact problem. It's too low-level, so everyone got to write their own build scripts on top of that to do the same thing as everyone else. Now there's a situation of a 1000s of bespoke build scripts and 3-4 different front-ends, all effectively doing the same thing. "In my line of work, sister, sometimes a second chance is a chance to mistake the same mistake twice" - State and Main
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

puredanger 4y ago

Working on Clojure and Datomic!

stonemetal12 4y ago

>used Clojure fulltime for five years. How did that work out for you? Usually following a hype cycle, there is a negative hype cycle i.e. Mongo is webscale, then Mongo is a buggy mess. Clojure seemed to just fade away. Did it turn out well or are there interesting pitfalls that make it not as great as advertised?

hombre_fatal 4y ago
Clojure is just really niche. Even an ecosystem that stays the same size overtime is dwarfed by the continually growing, continually polished competitor ecosystems that will pull people from the small niches. The best things about Clojure are things you don't really appreciate until you've already done the work to learn them. For example, I never would have known how amazing it was to evaluate code inside the editor until I did the work of learning Emacs + evil-mode + nrepl/cider + whatever so that I could spin up my http server in-process and then modify code without restarting everything. Even today I'm doing `nodemon index.ts` like a goofball. I stopped using Clojure simply when I met someone who wanted to build some big projects with me and, despite appreciating that Clojure was probably amazing, they simply couldn't be bothered to learn it. Fair enough. It was when Javascript was just getting `yield` coroutines (before async/await) which finally made Javascript bearable for me enough to switch to it for server work. Clojure just has increasingly compelling languages and ecosystems to compete with, yet it has a huge ramp up, being a lisp, that make it hard for people to choose it. Just consider how, to even write Clojure comfortably, you really need something like Paredit. Else, what exactly are you going to do if you want to nest or unnest a (form) deeper in the ast structure? Manually rebalance parens? Cut and paste it? Only Paredit lets you easily move a (form) around the ast. And it's amazing but yet another tool you have to learn just to truly evaluate Clojure.
- gsinclair 4y ago
  Parinfer is also amazing but easier to get started with.
- blatant303 4y ago
  You don't need paredit. I use Sublime and ctrl+shift+space. Been writing Clojure for 10 years or so.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

The whole clojure ecosystem and the wonderful tools around it never really took off due to unclear documentation, poor onboarding and too few evangelists. Datomic and other products are really cool but are now being given away as scrapware due to this lack of effort to make the whole ecosystem more palatable, colorful and easy to get into for new audiences.

cellularmitosis 4y ago
Even as a Clojure hobbyist I feel like all of these points are off? Between 4clojure, clojuredocs and the slack channel and the surprising number of books available, the onboarding and docs are great. And when I think of my favorite lang evangelists, hickey and nolen are absolutely #1 and #2, and have influenced me heavily, despite my day job not involving Clojure at all.