3 ms·

I felt some relief after watching the presentation. I thought I was just a whiny newbie who was spoiled by Python/AppEngine (although I guess the spoiled part i

by john2x 13y ago

I felt some relief after watching the presentation. I thought I was just a whiny newbie who was spoiled by Python/AppEngine (although I guess the spoiled part is true). Turns out it is a real issue with the Clojure ecosystem. Another talk from the conference I'm glad was presented is "How Clojure Works"[1]. Towards the end, he shows the negative effects on tooling caused by Clojure's dynamic + hosted nature. Clojure's stacktraces are a nightmare. And the painful startup time kind of negates the excitement a newcomer might have towards REPL-oriented development. Hopefully it won't be too long until things improve. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUI07y1SlQ&list=PLZdCLR02grLp__wRg5OTavVj4wefg69hM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUI07y1SlQ&list=PLZdCLR02gr...

sillysaurus3 13y ago
It's always better to have more people reviewing the security of an application, even if they seem like a whiny newbie.
leephillips 13y ago
"the painful startup time kind of negates the excitement a newcomer might have towards REPL-oriented development." But you just need to start up once and then work all day in the REPL. Unless you mean that the JVM startup means that Clojure is not a good choice for writing utility scripts and such. EDIT: As pointed out to me below, and in the excellent talk linked above, it's much more the Clojure bootstrapping time, which almost dwarfs the JVM startup time.
- omaranto 13y ago
  The startup time that makes Clojure unsuitable for utility scripts and such is really Clojure's, not the JVM's! JVM start up time is actually quite small these days. See for example, http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/03/19/solving-clojure-boot-time.html http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/03/19/solving-clojur...
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    Heh. Back in the day, Smalltalk had a reputation for being too slow to write command-line apps and utility scripts. There were even bits of wonderful tech developed that could produce Smalltalk images as small as 45k! But even more surprising: You could take the default VisualWorks, tell it to skip the herald sound and the splash screen and shut a few other things off, and it would load its 12MB default image faster than Perl 5 could start up with a 768k memory footprint.
stcredzero 13y ago
I felt some relief after watching the presentation. I thought I was just a whiny newbie who was spoiled by Python/AppEngine (although I guess the spoiled part is true). I would hazard a guess that some of this reflects on the Clojure community. (Not that this is somehow inherent or uncorrectable.)
- john2x 13y ago
  Oh I thought to myself that I was a whiny newbie. The community's (at least, irc and subreddit) pretty cool.

by john2x 13y ago

sillysaurus3 13y ago

It's always better to have more people reviewing the security of an application, even if they seem like a whiny newbie.

leephillips 13y ago

"the painful startup time kind of negates the excitement a newcomer might have towards REPL-oriented development." But you just need to start up once and then work all day in the REPL. Unless you mean that the JVM startup means that Clojure is not a good choice for writing utility scripts and such. EDIT: As pointed out to me below, and in the excellent talk linked above, it's much more the Clojure bootstrapping time, which almost dwarfs the JVM startup time.

omaranto 13y ago
The startup time that makes Clojure unsuitable for utility scripts and such is really Clojure's, not the JVM's! JVM start up time is actually quite small these days. See for example, http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/03/19/solving-clojure-boot-time.html http://nicholaskariniemi.github.io/2014/03/19/solving-clojur...
- stcredzero 13y ago
  Heh. Back in the day, Smalltalk had a reputation for being too slow to write command-line apps and utility scripts. There were even bits of wonderful tech developed that could produce Smalltalk images as small as 45k! But even more surprising: You could take the default VisualWorks, tell it to skip the herald sound and the splash screen and shut a few other things off, and it would load its 12MB default image faster than Perl 5 could start up with a 768k memory footprint.

stcredzero 13y ago

I felt some relief after watching the presentation. I thought I was just a whiny newbie who was spoiled by Python/AppEngine (although I guess the spoiled part is true). I would hazard a guess that some of this reflects on the Clojure community. (Not that this is somehow inherent or uncorrectable.)

john2x 13y ago
Oh I thought to myself that I was a whiny newbie. The community's (at least, irc and subreddit) pretty cool.