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As a data point: I've been running my solo-founder SaaS business for 10 years now using Clojure. It changed my life. It would not have been possible without Clo
by jwr 2y ago
As a data point: I've been running my solo-founder SaaS business for 10 years now using Clojure. It changed my life. It would not have been possible without Clojure and ClojureScript, building and maintaining an app of this complexity would have exceeded my limits.
The article is excellent and I agree with everything in it.
The stability of the language is unbelievably useful. I look around and it seems it isn't valued in many other ecosystems where people have to rewrite their software regularly. I can't afford to rewrite my app.
There will be plenty of armchair critics here, with cliché knee-jerk reactions (parentheses, JVM, startup time, etc). If you intend to form an opinion, I would suggest you read only into the insightful posts, from people who actually used the language, or from critics who present well thought-out criticism, not just a shallow knee-jerk reaction.
- stickfigure 2y agoYou will find that "whatever language you are most familiar with" is the only one that you will perceive makes it possible for you to build whatever you are working on.
- jwr 2y agoThat is a shallow take and I disagree — at least in my case, I make a conscious effort to avoid being a Blub programmer and regularly try different languages and look at different ecosystems. The choice of Clojure and ClojureScript for this application was not accidental, and it wasn't the thing I was most familiar with at the time. There are good reasons why I said it was only possible with Clojure and ClojureScript. Conciseness, expressiveness, long-term stability, the ability to share business logic code between the client and server, same language used for data serialization (e.g. no JSON), good async code support (core.async), transducers for code reuse and performance, and more.