4 ms·

I love writing Clojure. Whenever I say that publicly, there are inevitably some voices challenging my stance with skepticism, criticism, and attempts to discred

I love writing Clojure. Whenever I say that publicly, there are inevitably some voices challenging my stance with skepticism, criticism, and attempts to discredit whatever I say provides practical value for me. Then I have to explain to them, "no, it's not the only language I know," "yes, I've used dozens of other languages before," "yes, including languages with robust static type systems as well." And you know what? Finally, I realized - I don't have to explain to anyone in exact detail why I have not found the same deep love in C, C#, Python, Javascript, Typescript, Ruby, Go, Java, Kotlin, Swift, Lua, Haskell, and many others. Why do I need anyone's permission to love a tool? I love it, and I love it for many reasons - theoretical, practical, emotional, fiscal. Sure, I can get behind your excitement for Rust, Kotlin, OCaml, Elixir, Julia - you name it, but please, please do not try to "educate" me about my choices. I don't care about YOUR personal predicaments with Clojure/Clojurescript/Babashka/nbb, even Fennel. You find Clojure not to be worthy of your time - it's YOUR loss. My love for Clojure is not due to MY skill issues, not the result of MY inexperience, not because "I'm in a bubble," or "I don't know any better," or have zero knowledge of type systems, category theory, OOP or design patterns. Sure, Clojure is not without deficiencies - no tool is ever perfect. Yet pragmatically, no other programming language in the category of general-use PLs today satisfies me more than Clojure, no other language is nearly as joyful to use. I'm sure at some point my stance will change, I will find some other "perfect" language for me, and 100% guaranteed - it will too have some deficiencies and people will be arguing for the merits of choosing it for the job. Until that day, let me just say it again - "I fucking love Clojure!"

j45 2y ago
The use of prejudice type behaviour towards others using a particular programming language based on hearsay or unknown is not ok, but also not something new. The few folks I know using it are very happy with it, and are very experienced, and talented talented polyglots themselves. For that reason I'd not rule it out, even if I'm not looking to make a jump or change, but I might try it out.
golly_ned 2y ago
I've never seen anything but praise for clojure.
- iLemming 2y ago
  > I've never seen anything but praise for clojure. I've seen plenty of tomatoes here on the orange site, thrown at Clojure. Interestingly, years ago, when I was deciding if I should learn Clojure, I have typed into Google "why Clojure sucks". That's actually my usual "research technique" for any new tool - after the initial intro and the wikipedia pages, I typically do that and try to find some criticism, in order to remain level-headed. And guess what? To my surprise, instead, I found a plenty of compelling reasons to learn the damn thing, which I did. That has changed my life, not exaggeratingly, quite for real. So my conclusion and advice to young programmers? Use whatever tools make you happy. Don't worry about their popularity, don't listen to couch-surfing "experts", try them for yourself. Be skeptical, first and foremost about your own reservations, thoughts, and feelings - something you dislike initially may change your perspective later. Conversely, be looking out for even better ways - remember, it's always possible to find renewed joy for the craft, even after decades of trying different things. There's always something out there that would feel like it was made for you to enjoy it.
- roenxi 2y ago
  You've never seen someone encounter Clojure stacktrace-barf when something breaks before. The language isn't perfect. Although it is one of the few I've encountered that does immutability properly and that is great. The stacktrace-barf has improved a bit in recent versions as I recall, although I've lost the ability to see them by now.
- sundarurfriend 2y ago
  I was gonna reply something similar too. The only "counters" people have when talking about Clojure (that I see, as a non-Clojurian) are pretty weak, and are usually: "it uses JVM, and JVM bad mmmkay" and the typical lazy dismissal of Lisps as "omg it's parantheses everywhere".
  - 2y ago
gloomyday 2y ago
Through the last decade, I have found that programmers' judgment of technologies, tools, and languages are incredibly noisy. It is hard to make correct decisions based on opinions alone, and design by committee is a real thing. Common Lisp was the most mind-blowing language I ever touched, and it seems the creator of Clojure really filled the gap between the brilliant simplicity of Lisp as a language and the access to a mature ecosystem. Maybe I should try Clojure as my next language (I am enjoying Rust for now; Rust macros are also cool, but way more complicated)...
- erichocean 2y ago
  If you already like Common Lisp, what Clojure brings are: 1) runs on the JVM, access to any Java or Python library within Clojure without wrappers 2) an immutable-by-default language with a standard library that takes advantage of it 3) the best out-of-the-box concurrency story of any language I know of 4) a very well-developed ecosystem for developer tooling and general project stuff Common Lisp is very fun, but the stress level is definitely higher with it due to the mutability and the generally less well-designed APIs. Only lists are actually functional, concurrency is YOLO-tier, etc.
  - flavio81 2y ago
    > runs on the JVM, access to any Java or Python library within Clojure without wrappers If you already like Common Lisp, ABCL (Armed Bear Common Lisp) is a mature fully ANSI Common Lisp-compliant implementation, that runs on the JVM and can instance or load Java classes or call Java methods without wrappers and in only one line of code. > the best out-of-the-box concurrency story of any language I know of Lots of concurrency models also available on Common Lisp, including async, channel-based, etc. > Only lists are actually functional, concurrency is YOLO-tier, etc. I'm sad you had that experience, but there is tons of solid concurrency support in Lisp, for example lparallel is awesome. Clojure is nice as a JVM language alternative, that is, better than Kotlin, Groovy, etc. However the loss of the great interactive development facilities that Common Lisp has is a major, major downside. Interactive development is what makes CL (and also Smalltalk/Pharo) great.
regularmother 2y ago
Did you or any of your fellow devs have ADD or ADHD? How did they adapt to dynamic types? I have ADD and I once heard that devs with ADD/ADHD have an incredibly small heap size for context but compensate for their weakness by being great at solving logical problems in that small heap. Types have been essential for me when functioning in code bases. I really struggle with pure JS and untyped Python. Clojure was similarly hard for me. What tools and/or techniques do such folks use for comprehending already written Clojure code?
- itsfine2 2y ago
  Types and other techniques as an accessibility tool for the ADHD brain - Michael Newton talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd1-rAIYV6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd1-rAIYV6I
  - yamrzou 2y ago
    That was an interesting talk, thanks for sharing.
- cardanome 2y ago
  Not everyone with ADHD struggles with small heap size. Even if I have a smaller total heap size (maybe), personally my hyper focus allows me to nearly dedicate all the heap space to the specific task at hand. I probably outperform neurotypical people here. I just can't have anything else in my head. Task switching kills me. So it is hard to say cause everyone is a bit different. For me the interactive, REPL-based workflow makes my ADHD brain very happy. Always having a program running is really nice. Plus immutability makes it much easier to reason about things. I do like static typing as well and I could see how it might help. I strongly believe that gradual typing allows for the best of two worlds, so that you can do both exploratory, interactive programming and type driven programming, depending on your needs. Not sure how well the solutions for gradual typing in Clojure work though. I have only experience with Common Lisp. Coalton might the exactly what you need: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton
- doall 2y ago
rendaw 2y ago
So I think people probably hear "I love clojure" and take it as advocacy. I mean, maybe it isn't supposed to be advocacy, but "I keep hearing people say they love X" is a decent reason to start using something, and I think people are influenced that way. When you're writing software you benefit from libraries the community made, and lots of people end up writing libraries and contributing back. It's possible Zig is much better for C, but they're failing to gain users due to lots of C developers continuing to use C for new projects, whereas if there were more users maybe the Zig ecosystem would be larger, making it easier to write larger pieces of software. And I think basically all software is a collaborative effort. Users have investment in tools they think are useful, and frequently contribute or even take over maintenance on critical software. In that case they need to deal with whatever technical decisions that project made. Even commercial software can be abandoned as a buggy mess due to technical choices forcing users to migrate, or eventually open sourced (blender, doom, etc) in which case private technical choices become public. Also I think a lot of people have been forced to contribute (i.e. professionally) to projects that initially made very poor technical decisions and have been scarred by it. No tool is perfect, and abstract technical debate is awful, but I think it's hard to say there isn't worse and better software, and I think it's worth the effort to put in effort to debate to try to discern and move from worse to better tools since the whole community benefits that way. Edit: re-essayed

j45 2y ago

The use of prejudice type behaviour towards others using a particular programming language based on hearsay or unknown is not ok, but also not something new. The few folks I know using it are very happy with it, and are very experienced, and talented talented polyglots themselves. For that reason I'd not rule it out, even if I'm not looking to make a jump or change, but I might try it out.

golly_ned 2y ago

I've never seen anything but praise for clojure.

iLemming 2y ago
> I've never seen anything but praise for clojure. I've seen plenty of tomatoes here on the orange site, thrown at Clojure. Interestingly, years ago, when I was deciding if I should learn Clojure, I have typed into Google "why Clojure sucks". That's actually my usual "research technique" for any new tool - after the initial intro and the wikipedia pages, I typically do that and try to find some criticism, in order to remain level-headed. And guess what? To my surprise, instead, I found a plenty of compelling reasons to learn the damn thing, which I did. That has changed my life, not exaggeratingly, quite for real. So my conclusion and advice to young programmers? Use whatever tools make you happy. Don't worry about their popularity, don't listen to couch-surfing "experts", try them for yourself. Be skeptical, first and foremost about your own reservations, thoughts, and feelings - something you dislike initially may change your perspective later. Conversely, be looking out for even better ways - remember, it's always possible to find renewed joy for the craft, even after decades of trying different things. There's always something out there that would feel like it was made for you to enjoy it.
roenxi 2y ago
You've never seen someone encounter Clojure stacktrace-barf when something breaks before. The language isn't perfect. Although it is one of the few I've encountered that does immutability properly and that is great. The stacktrace-barf has improved a bit in recent versions as I recall, although I've lost the ability to see them by now.
sundarurfriend 2y ago
I was gonna reply something similar too. The only "counters" people have when talking about Clojure (that I see, as a non-Clojurian) are pretty weak, and are usually: "it uses JVM, and JVM bad mmmkay" and the typical lazy dismissal of Lisps as "omg it's parantheses everywhere".
- 2y ago

gloomyday 2y ago

Through the last decade, I have found that programmers' judgment of technologies, tools, and languages are incredibly noisy. It is hard to make correct decisions based on opinions alone, and design by committee is a real thing. Common Lisp was the most mind-blowing language I ever touched, and it seems the creator of Clojure really filled the gap between the brilliant simplicity of Lisp as a language and the access to a mature ecosystem. Maybe I should try Clojure as my next language (I am enjoying Rust for now; Rust macros are also cool, but way more complicated)...

erichocean 2y ago
If you already like Common Lisp, what Clojure brings are: 1) runs on the JVM, access to any Java or Python library within Clojure without wrappers 2) an immutable-by-default language with a standard library that takes advantage of it 3) the best out-of-the-box concurrency story of any language I know of 4) a very well-developed ecosystem for developer tooling and general project stuff Common Lisp is very fun, but the stress level is definitely higher with it due to the mutability and the generally less well-designed APIs. Only lists are actually functional, concurrency is YOLO-tier, etc.
- flavio81 2y ago
  > runs on the JVM, access to any Java or Python library within Clojure without wrappers If you already like Common Lisp, ABCL (Armed Bear Common Lisp) is a mature fully ANSI Common Lisp-compliant implementation, that runs on the JVM and can instance or load Java classes or call Java methods without wrappers and in only one line of code. > the best out-of-the-box concurrency story of any language I know of Lots of concurrency models also available on Common Lisp, including async, channel-based, etc. > Only lists are actually functional, concurrency is YOLO-tier, etc. I'm sad you had that experience, but there is tons of solid concurrency support in Lisp, for example lparallel is awesome. Clojure is nice as a JVM language alternative, that is, better than Kotlin, Groovy, etc. However the loss of the great interactive development facilities that Common Lisp has is a major, major downside. Interactive development is what makes CL (and also Smalltalk/Pharo) great.

regularmother 2y ago

Did you or any of your fellow devs have ADD or ADHD? How did they adapt to dynamic types? I have ADD and I once heard that devs with ADD/ADHD have an incredibly small heap size for context but compensate for their weakness by being great at solving logical problems in that small heap. Types have been essential for me when functioning in code bases. I really struggle with pure JS and untyped Python. Clojure was similarly hard for me. What tools and/or techniques do such folks use for comprehending already written Clojure code?

itsfine2 2y ago
Types and other techniques as an accessibility tool for the ADHD brain - Michael Newton talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd1-rAIYV6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd1-rAIYV6I
- yamrzou 2y ago
  That was an interesting talk, thanks for sharing.
cardanome 2y ago
Not everyone with ADHD struggles with small heap size. Even if I have a smaller total heap size (maybe), personally my hyper focus allows me to nearly dedicate all the heap space to the specific task at hand. I probably outperform neurotypical people here. I just can't have anything else in my head. Task switching kills me. So it is hard to say cause everyone is a bit different. For me the interactive, REPL-based workflow makes my ADHD brain very happy. Always having a program running is really nice. Plus immutability makes it much easier to reason about things. I do like static typing as well and I could see how it might help. I strongly believe that gradual typing allows for the best of two worlds, so that you can do both exploratory, interactive programming and type driven programming, depending on your needs. Not sure how well the solutions for gradual typing in Clojure work though. I have only experience with Common Lisp. Coalton might the exactly what you need: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton
doall 2y ago

rendaw 2y ago

So I think people probably hear "I love clojure" and take it as advocacy. I mean, maybe it isn't supposed to be advocacy, but "I keep hearing people say they love X" is a decent reason to start using something, and I think people are influenced that way. When you're writing software you benefit from libraries the community made, and lots of people end up writing libraries and contributing back. It's possible Zig is much better for C, but they're failing to gain users due to lots of C developers continuing to use C for new projects, whereas if there were more users maybe the Zig ecosystem would be larger, making it easier to write larger pieces of software. And I think basically all software is a collaborative effort. Users have investment in tools they think are useful, and frequently contribute or even take over maintenance on critical software. In that case they need to deal with whatever technical decisions that project made. Even commercial software can be abandoned as a buggy mess due to technical choices forcing users to migrate, or eventually open sourced (blender, doom, etc) in which case private technical choices become public. Also I think a lot of people have been forced to contribute (i.e. professionally) to projects that initially made very poor technical decisions and have been scarred by it. No tool is perfect, and abstract technical debate is awful, but I think it's hard to say there isn't worse and better software, and I think it's worth the effort to put in effort to debate to try to discern and move from worse to better tools since the whole community benefits that way. Edit: re-essayed