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I feel like the "Why Use Clojure?" essay is a bit flawed. I feel like it focuses too much on details so minor that I would regard them as trivial. I would sugge

I feel like the "Why Use Clojure?" essay is a bit flawed. I feel like it focuses too much on details so minor that I would regard them as trivial. I would suggest that a much better answer to the question "Why use Clojure?" could be found by reading Colin Steele's essays. When he became CTO at Hotelicopter/RoomKey he was inheriting a vast system of PHP and Ruby. When they re-wrote the system in Clojure, he had a very small team: only 4 programmers. That they were able to accomplish so much in a short amount of time says a lot about the power of Clojure. These are 2 essays he wrote: 60,000% growth in 7 months using Clojure and AWS http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in-7-months-using-clojure-and-aws http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in... Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grai... At this point RoomKey is a lot bigger than Hipmunk.

edwinnathaniel 13y ago
It's hard to write any kind of essays that try to show that X is better than Y in the realm of Programming Language + Platform (yes, Programming Languages these days don't buy much if the Platform is under-supported even though the majority won't admit it). If you wrote too high-level without enough details, people would call you out for "supporting your argument without any merit". If you wrote too technical/low-level, it looks like a script kiddie toy and not "for production ready system with complex requirements and multiple stakeholders with evolving needs". I gave up convincing people a while ago and just focus on get things done. Java, as verbose as it is, still productive enough for me thanks to the ecosystem + tools + libraries + etc.
sehugg 13y ago
Those posts don't tell me much about Clojure, except that Ruby wasn't fast enough and Java wasn't fun enough, and that the CTO digs Lisp. Doesn't give me concrete reasons why I couldn't do the same with Java + Netty.
- lkrubner 13y ago
  If you want a more detailed response, I posted a longer and more technical answer in response to the recent post "Why functional programming?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961033

edwinnathaniel 13y ago

It's hard to write any kind of essays that try to show that X is better than Y in the realm of Programming Language + Platform (yes, Programming Languages these days don't buy much if the Platform is under-supported even though the majority won't admit it). If you wrote too high-level without enough details, people would call you out for "supporting your argument without any merit". If you wrote too technical/low-level, it looks like a script kiddie toy and not "for production ready system with complex requirements and multiple stakeholders with evolving needs". I gave up convincing people a while ago and just focus on get things done. Java, as verbose as it is, still productive enough for me thanks to the ecosystem + tools + libraries + etc.

sehugg 13y ago

Those posts don't tell me much about Clojure, except that Ruby wasn't fast enough and Java wasn't fun enough, and that the CTO digs Lisp. Doesn't give me concrete reasons why I couldn't do the same with Java + Netty.

lkrubner 13y ago
If you want a more detailed response, I posted a longer and more technical answer in response to the recent post "Why functional programming?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961033