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>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, t

>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 3y 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 3y ago
  Parinfer is also amazing but easier to get started with.
- blatant303 3y ago
  You don't need paredit. I use Sublime and ctrl+shift+space. Been writing Clojure for 10 years or so.
- elangoc 3y ago
  People who use Parinfer rather than Paredit when learning Clojure really like it. The concept is available in the Clojure mode in all the usual suspects of IDEs (IntelliJ Cursive, emacs Cider, etc.) https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ The size of the community is not as important as the value of what is available. It's just not widely known, or maybe there's still much potential yet unrealized. This is an oldie but a goodie on how interactive an experience you can have when using Clojure on the front end and backend of a web app: https://figwheel.org/ https://figwheel.org/ This project is the most recent and most promising iteration of someone making a very visual interactive tool for introspecting on data structures in the REPL environment https://github.com/djblue/portal https://github.com/djblue/portal
askonomm 3y ago
As far as the metrics state, Clojure never faded away. It's on an upward trajectory still, albeit slowly. Perhaps it faded away in terms of "HN hype of the day". That said, I've been (and currently am) a Clojure engineer for the past 5 years and loving it. Quite a lot of jobs out there, more and more each time I look, healthy ecosystem and friendly community. It doesn't hurt that it's the most paid programming language as well.
- robertfw 3y ago
  The jobs seem to be pretty available in Europe, but I've been struggling to find Clojure work over here on the west coast of North America. I've had to bite the bullet and am looking for work in other languages now, though I'd really rather stay in the ecosystem.
  - askonomm 3y ago
    Are you active on the Clojurians Slack channel? On #jobs and #remote-jobs channels every now and then a US job pops up there. You can also post on those channels that you are open for work, might help. I'd also check out some EU job offers (unless the salary is way lower compared to your location) because there are companies that do async and wouldn't care for timezones as much.
mschaef 3y ago
I've used Clojure personally for >10 years and done a bit with it commercially along the way. (I also have a personal affection for Lisp-like languages that goes back to at least the mid-90's.) > How did that work out for you? For the personal projects, it's been incredibly useful. The language fits the way I think, and being built on the JVM, it has both a performant runtime and lots of access to a wide ecosystem of libraries. The Clojure-specific ecosystem library has been accused of being stagnant. I tend to take a more charitable view. The libraries I've used have tended to be smaller in scope and more well defined in terms of feature set. This makes it easier for them to converge on a feature-complete state, and many of them have done just that. If you don't mind assembling multiple smaller libraries into the useful whole you need, this can provide a stable platform on which to build and develop expertise and higher level libraries. For larger scale commercial work, it's a harder sell. As you've pointed out, Clojure is not hugely popular, so it's fundamentally a minority language. This can make VC's touchy about funding. This is true to the extent I'm aware of at least one organization that started moving away from Clojure for that reason. There's also the shape of the learning curve. It can be hard to get started with Clojure because of the issues around the syntax and associated tooling. The more piecemeal aspect of the library ecosystem can then make it harder to get to hit the early successes a larger framework-oriented approach can give you out of the box. You can get there, but it at least takes more initial effort. The same is true for all the abstractive power of Clojure (and other Lisps). Abstractions are nice, but they take time to develop and the payoff is on a considerable lag. The useful rule about waiting to abstract until after you see 2 or 3 instances of a pattern means you need to at least have spent enough time to see those 2 or 3 instances (and maybe a few more) before you really start to see the payoff in your own code. The net of all this is that it's a language that may make it more difficult to get funding, will be initially somewhat confusing to most developers, and the payoff may well be deferred to the point you don't see it before you give up (either out of frustration or due to external factors). All in all, a considerable set of headwinds. So what does that mean? It's probably better for projects on a longer time horizon that have a team willing and able to put in extended effort to effectively use the language. (And if the team is not self-funded, good to have a funder with some ability to accept the risk of a non-conventional solution). Not saying these projects don't exist, just that they're not common enough to build a 'popular/mass-market' ecosystem on.

hombre_fatal 3y 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 3y ago
Parinfer is also amazing but easier to get started with.
blatant303 3y ago
You don't need paredit. I use Sublime and ctrl+shift+space. Been writing Clojure for 10 years or so.
elangoc 3y ago
People who use Parinfer rather than Paredit when learning Clojure really like it. The concept is available in the Clojure mode in all the usual suspects of IDEs (IntelliJ Cursive, emacs Cider, etc.) https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ The size of the community is not as important as the value of what is available. It's just not widely known, or maybe there's still much potential yet unrealized. This is an oldie but a goodie on how interactive an experience you can have when using Clojure on the front end and backend of a web app: https://figwheel.org/ https://figwheel.org/ This project is the most recent and most promising iteration of someone making a very visual interactive tool for introspecting on data structures in the REPL environment https://github.com/djblue/portal https://github.com/djblue/portal

askonomm 3y ago

As far as the metrics state, Clojure never faded away. It's on an upward trajectory still, albeit slowly. Perhaps it faded away in terms of "HN hype of the day". That said, I've been (and currently am) a Clojure engineer for the past 5 years and loving it. Quite a lot of jobs out there, more and more each time I look, healthy ecosystem and friendly community. It doesn't hurt that it's the most paid programming language as well.

robertfw 3y ago
The jobs seem to be pretty available in Europe, but I've been struggling to find Clojure work over here on the west coast of North America. I've had to bite the bullet and am looking for work in other languages now, though I'd really rather stay in the ecosystem.
- askonomm 3y ago
  Are you active on the Clojurians Slack channel? On #jobs and #remote-jobs channels every now and then a US job pops up there. You can also post on those channels that you are open for work, might help. I'd also check out some EU job offers (unless the salary is way lower compared to your location) because there are companies that do async and wouldn't care for timezones as much.

mschaef 3y ago

I've used Clojure personally for >10 years and done a bit with it commercially along the way. (I also have a personal affection for Lisp-like languages that goes back to at least the mid-90's.) > How did that work out for you? For the personal projects, it's been incredibly useful. The language fits the way I think, and being built on the JVM, it has both a performant runtime and lots of access to a wide ecosystem of libraries. The Clojure-specific ecosystem library has been accused of being stagnant. I tend to take a more charitable view. The libraries I've used have tended to be smaller in scope and more well defined in terms of feature set. This makes it easier for them to converge on a feature-complete state, and many of them have done just that. If you don't mind assembling multiple smaller libraries into the useful whole you need, this can provide a stable platform on which to build and develop expertise and higher level libraries. For larger scale commercial work, it's a harder sell. As you've pointed out, Clojure is not hugely popular, so it's fundamentally a minority language. This can make VC's touchy about funding. This is true to the extent I'm aware of at least one organization that started moving away from Clojure for that reason. There's also the shape of the learning curve. It can be hard to get started with Clojure because of the issues around the syntax and associated tooling. The more piecemeal aspect of the library ecosystem can then make it harder to get to hit the early successes a larger framework-oriented approach can give you out of the box. You can get there, but it at least takes more initial effort. The same is true for all the abstractive power of Clojure (and other Lisps). Abstractions are nice, but they take time to develop and the payoff is on a considerable lag. The useful rule about waiting to abstract until after you see 2 or 3 instances of a pattern means you need to at least have spent enough time to see those 2 or 3 instances (and maybe a few more) before you really start to see the payoff in your own code. The net of all this is that it's a language that may make it more difficult to get funding, will be initially somewhat confusing to most developers, and the payoff may well be deferred to the point you don't see it before you give up (either out of frustration or due to external factors). All in all, a considerable set of headwinds. So what does that mean? It's probably better for projects on a longer time horizon that have a team willing and able to put in extended effort to effectively use the language. (And if the team is not self-funded, good to have a funder with some ability to accept the risk of a non-conventional solution). Not saying these projects don't exist, just that they're not common enough to build a 'popular/mass-market' ecosystem on.