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Because Clojure. I've seen the phrase "I want to be programming Clojure all day" or "I program in Clojure for money !" many times. These people are enchanted by

Because Clojure. I've seen the phrase "I want to be programming Clojure all day" or "I program in Clojure for money !" many times. These people are enchanted by Clojure and I'm slowly becoming one of them. Maybe only the Haskell crowd has such a deep infatuation with their language. All other programming languages look boring and limited compared to it. Scheme and other lisps are another era -ish, Java, C++ and other OO languages are totally entangled in hierarchies of mutable code-data structures, it has concurrency "done right", pure functions mixed with mutable constructs, etc. So you have this 21st century functional lisp designed for concurrency with native interoperability with the Java and Javascript worlds. What's not to like ?

didsomeonesay 11y ago
> What's not to like ? Program startup times and JVM stacktraces, for one. Nevertheless I am just getting started with Clojure and really like what I am seeing so far.
- codeshaman 11y ago
  Yes, that question had a little bit of salt in it as well. The startup times are one of the things, tooling isn't quite there yet (although getting better and better). And I have an allergy to the JVM/Java, but am willing to live with it because of the language. Clojure at C/C++ speed would be a true wonder.
  - siscia 11y ago
    Actually clojure is been designed to be hosted, it should not be difficult to build a clojure (dialect) that compile into a system language... Well of course it is difficult in the absolute meaning, but not so difficult... When I was younger I tried to figured out every single interface that clojure use, and there weren't too much... Some figure here[1] It would be a really interesting summer project... [1]: http://siscia.github.io/2013/11/28/visualize-hierarchy-behind-java-class/ http://siscia.github.io/2013/11/28/visualize-hierarchy-behin...
    - yogthos 11y ago
      There's a LLVM Clojure dialect called Pixie https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie that has extremely fast startup
- yogthos 11y ago
  The idea is that you do most of your work using a REPL. The typical workflow for Clojure is to start the app once and work with it interactively. Clojure editors have tight integration with the REPL, so you can send any code from the editor to be evaluated in the context of the running application image. While stacktraces are long, the relevant information tends to be easy to identify. In most cases you just look for a the first occurrence of a namespace from your project and trace from there. There also tools for making reading stack traces easier such as https://github.com/venantius/ultra https://github.com/venantius/ultra and https://github.com/magnars/prone https://github.com/magnars/prone
bachmeier 11y ago
> What's not to like ? When I tried it several years ago: - All the documentation assumed you knew and understood the Java world. You were supposed to know about the classpath, how com.this.that.foo.bar works, how Maven works, etc. - Difficulty communicating with C libraries. This was an intentional choice of the Java creators. Not Clojure's fault, but still a problem nonetheless. - The error messages made it hard for me to get work done and there was no way I'd expect someone else to use a language with error messages like that. - Somewhat unstable tools. There would be major changes to the tools, like the Eclipse plugin, and they would not be documented. The contrib libraries changed dramatically with Clojure 1.3. While I'm sure it was fun making the new system, I wasn't happy being unable to use the contrib libraries, because they either didn't work or the documentation didn't exist. A language that introduces major breaking changes without a solid transition plan in place is not one that I want to use. - The documentation was limited in places. This was a major issue with new releases. It felt to me as though there was a team of core developers that were in the inner circle, so they got to use all the features, but the rest of us got what they decided to share.
- harperlee 11y ago
  Completely agree. Documentation is sparse, and blog posts outdated. The error messages don't help, either. Why can't stack traces show arguments, for the love of God? Can I get only my namespaces' traces? I will assume that the language is ok - most of the users won't be capable of diving into it, so just hide it by default...
- codeshaman 11y ago
  I guess it was still very young when you tried it. Things are better now, there are a couple of good books on clojure, many tutorials and the documentation is good (eg. clojuredocs.org). I've started learning it about 2 months ago and the hardest thing for me was figuring out which editor/IDE to use. There's a bunch of options - LightTable, Emacs, NightCode, IntelliJ+Cursive, vi SublimeText and Eclipse. Some work better than others, but eventually I ended up using IntelliJ+Cursive, which provides project integration, REPL and debugger.
- brudgers 11y ago

didsomeonesay 11y ago

> What's not to like ? Program startup times and JVM stacktraces, for one. Nevertheless I am just getting started with Clojure and really like what I am seeing so far.

codeshaman 11y ago
Yes, that question had a little bit of salt in it as well. The startup times are one of the things, tooling isn't quite there yet (although getting better and better). And I have an allergy to the JVM/Java, but am willing to live with it because of the language. Clojure at C/C++ speed would be a true wonder.
- siscia 11y ago
  Actually clojure is been designed to be hosted, it should not be difficult to build a clojure (dialect) that compile into a system language... Well of course it is difficult in the absolute meaning, but not so difficult... When I was younger I tried to figured out every single interface that clojure use, and there weren't too much... Some figure here[1] It would be a really interesting summer project... [1]: http://siscia.github.io/2013/11/28/visualize-hierarchy-behind-java-class/ http://siscia.github.io/2013/11/28/visualize-hierarchy-behin...
  - yogthos 11y ago
    There's a LLVM Clojure dialect called Pixie https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie that has extremely fast startup
yogthos 11y ago
The idea is that you do most of your work using a REPL. The typical workflow for Clojure is to start the app once and work with it interactively. Clojure editors have tight integration with the REPL, so you can send any code from the editor to be evaluated in the context of the running application image. While stacktraces are long, the relevant information tends to be easy to identify. In most cases you just look for a the first occurrence of a namespace from your project and trace from there. There also tools for making reading stack traces easier such as https://github.com/venantius/ultra https://github.com/venantius/ultra and https://github.com/magnars/prone https://github.com/magnars/prone

bachmeier 11y ago

> What's not to like ? When I tried it several years ago: - All the documentation assumed you knew and understood the Java world. You were supposed to know about the classpath, how com.this.that.foo.bar works, how Maven works, etc. - Difficulty communicating with C libraries. This was an intentional choice of the Java creators. Not Clojure's fault, but still a problem nonetheless. - The error messages made it hard for me to get work done and there was no way I'd expect someone else to use a language with error messages like that. - Somewhat unstable tools. There would be major changes to the tools, like the Eclipse plugin, and they would not be documented. The contrib libraries changed dramatically with Clojure 1.3. While I'm sure it was fun making the new system, I wasn't happy being unable to use the contrib libraries, because they either didn't work or the documentation didn't exist. A language that introduces major breaking changes without a solid transition plan in place is not one that I want to use. - The documentation was limited in places. This was a major issue with new releases. It felt to me as though there was a team of core developers that were in the inner circle, so they got to use all the features, but the rest of us got what they decided to share.

harperlee 11y ago
Completely agree. Documentation is sparse, and blog posts outdated. The error messages don't help, either. Why can't stack traces show arguments, for the love of God? Can I get only my namespaces' traces? I will assume that the language is ok - most of the users won't be capable of diving into it, so just hide it by default...
codeshaman 11y ago
I guess it was still very young when you tried it. Things are better now, there are a couple of good books on clojure, many tutorials and the documentation is good (eg. clojuredocs.org). I've started learning it about 2 months ago and the hardest thing for me was figuring out which editor/IDE to use. There's a bunch of options - LightTable, Emacs, NightCode, IntelliJ+Cursive, vi SublimeText and Eclipse. Some work better than others, but eventually I ended up using IntelliJ+Cursive, which provides project integration, REPL and debugger.
brudgers 11y ago