7 ms·

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language.

by nnq 14y ago

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language...

ConstantineXVI 14y ago
I'd imagine that's the idea behind Datomic, though less direct: create product, get funded/income, make both Datomic and Clojure better in the process.
wheaties 14y ago
I think Rich knows that you can't sell a technology or language, you have to sell a product. That's why he did Datomic. That said, I write Scala at my current job and am super excited that Typesafe got this funding. Please, Typesafe, follow Rich's lead. Make a real product backed by a technology, not a bunch of libraries! I want you to be around for years to come. p.s. we're hiring. You don't even have to be super smart, just be passionate. owreese AT gmail DOT com
- fogus 14y ago
  Make a real product backed by a technology Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that they tried that with "Cloud Akka". I do not know the details as to why, but I believe that tech is now open source.
- jonas_boner 14y ago
  Typesafe has a product; the Typesafe Stack. It's not just "a bunch of libraries". Add to this the Typesafe Console that you get as part of it (http://console-demo.typesafe.com/ http://console-demo.typesafe.com/) and I think you have a pretty nice and complete product.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- snprbob86 14y ago
  > That's why he did Datomic. That's definitely one reason. I'm willing to bet the other reason is that he believes that the world needs Datomic. Because it really, really does. His talks make it clear that he deeply understands that.
  - erichocean 14y ago
    The world needs another piece of closed source, proprietary infrastructure written in an obscure language? My number one rule for infrastructure software: never, ever build your business on closed source software. Doesn't matter if it's free, or costs tens of thousands of dollars per month to operate, or is written by a superhuman like developer. You will be hurt Every. Single. Time. if you do.
    - snprbob86 14y ago
      > another piece of closed source, proprietary infrastructure No, the world needs a modernized view of the relational database model. > an obscure language The APIs are Java-first, Clojure-second. The implementation is a mix of the two. Java isn't that obscure... > never, ever build your business on closed source software. I agree with that. Ask any one of my new coworkers how they feel about this company's dependency on Oracle and they'll tell you that they learned that lesson. I'm not proposing that you take a dependency on Datomic for your startup. I'm saying that there are a lot of enterprises who have no choice, but to take dependencies on things they don't understand because they aren't software companies. Microsoft's entire enterprise business depends on people who want to outsource infrastructure to somebody else, and those customers pay enough money to secure the future and direction of that infrastructure. Rich Hickey & co can capitalize on that group of people. He gets to help them and they'll pay him for it. Along the way, database systems will adopt the improvements and new ideas that Datomic is leading the way with.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
markokocic 14y ago
The company/startup behind Light Table is trying pretty hard to make Clojure more popular by providing sorely needed tools for it.
fogus 14y ago
The commercial entity behind Clojure, Clojure/core is not modeled in the same way as TypeSafe. Instead, its main focus (at the moment at least) is providing training[1]. The truly commercial entity in the Rich Hickey universe is Datomic and as a result also works under a different model than Typesafe.[2] [1]: http://roadshow.clojure.com/ http://roadshow.clojure.com/ [2]: http://www.datomic.com/ http://www.datomic.com/
taligent 14y ago
5th search result for Closure in Google: http://freegeek.in/blog/2011/06/10-clojure-one-liners/ http://freegeek.in/blog/2011/06/10-clojure-one-liners/ Tell me that is not Perl all over again.
- batista 14y ago
  It's not Perl all over again. Have you even _read_ those one-liners? Those are neither line-noise, nor fickle one-line imperative solutions. On the contrary, they are elegant and easy to read --you just have to understand the basics of functional programming, map, reduce, filter and the like (which, in themselves are trivial concepts). Stuff like those in the article: (pmap process-line lines) (dotimes [n 4] (println "Happy Birthday " (if (= n 2) "dear Rich" "to You"))) (reduce max [14 35 -7 46 98]) (def file-text (slurp "data.txt")) (partition-by #(> % 60) [49 58 76 82 88 90]) (clojure.xml/parse "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=clojure http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=clojure) are so easy and clutter-free that what I cannot even begin to comprehend how someone would accuse them of the bad readability that characterises the "Perl one-liner".
  - yarrel 14y ago
    I still hate the square brackets and the slashes. Sorry, hate is such a strong word. I mean that I still find the language's typographic irregularities hopelessly distracting to the point where I won't touch it with a bargepole. They compare to perl one liners more than they do to Lisp one-liners due to their greater syntactic cruft.
    - pivo 14y ago
      I initially disliked the square brakets as well, but I got over it quickly because of the utter happiness I get from writing Clojure code in general. FYI, the square brackets are not an arbitrary deviation from lisp syntax. Square brackets are Clojure's vector syntax, the use of square brackets in function and macro definitions reflects the fact that they are actually vectors. Not sure what you meant with your objection to slashes though.
  - 14y ago
SatvikBeri 14y ago
This will probably improve Clojure adoption in the long run. It's much easier to go from learning 1 to 2 functional programming languages than it is to go from 0 to 1.

by nnq 14y ago

In the meantime, in the alternative universe I wish I were living in, the same thing happens to the company behind the widely used Clojure programming language...

ConstantineXVI 14y ago

I'd imagine that's the idea behind Datomic, though less direct: create product, get funded/income, make both Datomic and Clojure better in the process.

wheaties 14y ago

I think Rich knows that you can't sell a technology or language, you have to sell a product. That's why he did Datomic. That said, I write Scala at my current job and am super excited that Typesafe got this funding. Please, Typesafe, follow Rich's lead. Make a real product backed by a technology, not a bunch of libraries! I want you to be around for years to come. p.s. we're hiring. You don't even have to be super smart, just be passionate. owreese AT gmail DOT com

fogus 14y ago
Make a real product backed by a technology Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that they tried that with "Cloud Akka". I do not know the details as to why, but I believe that tech is now open source.
jonas_boner 14y ago
Typesafe has a product; the Typesafe Stack. It's not just "a bunch of libraries". Add to this the Typesafe Console that you get as part of it (http://console-demo.typesafe.com/ http://console-demo.typesafe.com/) and I think you have a pretty nice and complete product.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
snprbob86 14y ago
> That's why he did Datomic. That's definitely one reason. I'm willing to bet the other reason is that he believes that the world needs Datomic. Because it really, really does. His talks make it clear that he deeply understands that.
- erichocean 14y ago
  The world needs another piece of closed source, proprietary infrastructure written in an obscure language? My number one rule for infrastructure software: never, ever build your business on closed source software. Doesn't matter if it's free, or costs tens of thousands of dollars per month to operate, or is written by a superhuman like developer. You will be hurt Every. Single. Time. if you do.
  - snprbob86 14y ago
    > another piece of closed source, proprietary infrastructure No, the world needs a modernized view of the relational database model. > an obscure language The APIs are Java-first, Clojure-second. The implementation is a mix of the two. Java isn't that obscure... > never, ever build your business on closed source software. I agree with that. Ask any one of my new coworkers how they feel about this company's dependency on Oracle and they'll tell you that they learned that lesson. I'm not proposing that you take a dependency on Datomic for your startup. I'm saying that there are a lot of enterprises who have no choice, but to take dependencies on things they don't understand because they aren't software companies. Microsoft's entire enterprise business depends on people who want to outsource infrastructure to somebody else, and those customers pay enough money to secure the future and direction of that infrastructure. Rich Hickey & co can capitalize on that group of people. He gets to help them and they'll pay him for it. Along the way, database systems will adopt the improvements and new ideas that Datomic is leading the way with.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

markokocic 14y ago

The company/startup behind Light Table is trying pretty hard to make Clojure more popular by providing sorely needed tools for it.

fogus 14y ago

The commercial entity behind Clojure, Clojure/core is not modeled in the same way as TypeSafe. Instead, its main focus (at the moment at least) is providing training[1]. The truly commercial entity in the Rich Hickey universe is Datomic and as a result also works under a different model than Typesafe.[2] [1]: http://roadshow.clojure.com/ http://roadshow.clojure.com/ [2]: http://www.datomic.com/ http://www.datomic.com/

taligent 14y ago

5th search result for Closure in Google: http://freegeek.in/blog/2011/06/10-clojure-one-liners/ http://freegeek.in/blog/2011/06/10-clojure-one-liners/ Tell me that is not Perl all over again.

batista 14y ago
It's not Perl all over again. Have you even _read_ those one-liners? Those are neither line-noise, nor fickle one-line imperative solutions. On the contrary, they are elegant and easy to read --you just have to understand the basics of functional programming, map, reduce, filter and the like (which, in themselves are trivial concepts). Stuff like those in the article: (pmap process-line lines) (dotimes [n 4] (println "Happy Birthday " (if (= n 2) "dear Rich" "to You"))) (reduce max [14 35 -7 46 98]) (def file-text (slurp "data.txt")) (partition-by #(> % 60) [49 58 76 82 88 90]) (clojure.xml/parse "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=clojure http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=clojure) are so easy and clutter-free that what I cannot even begin to comprehend how someone would accuse them of the bad readability that characterises the "Perl one-liner".
- yarrel 14y ago
  I still hate the square brackets and the slashes. Sorry, hate is such a strong word. I mean that I still find the language's typographic irregularities hopelessly distracting to the point where I won't touch it with a bargepole. They compare to perl one liners more than they do to Lisp one-liners due to their greater syntactic cruft.
  - pivo 14y ago
    I initially disliked the square brakets as well, but I got over it quickly because of the utter happiness I get from writing Clojure code in general. FYI, the square brackets are not an arbitrary deviation from lisp syntax. Square brackets are Clojure's vector syntax, the use of square brackets in function and macro definitions reflects the fact that they are actually vectors. Not sure what you meant with your objection to slashes though.
- 14y ago

SatvikBeri 14y ago

This will probably improve Clojure adoption in the long run. It's much easier to go from learning 1 to 2 functional programming languages than it is to go from 0 to 1.