Amazon is hiring Clojure devs

http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/clojure-software-development-engineers-amazon-com/

by edem • 12 years ago

145 81 12 years ago

lispjobs.wordpress.com

jimmcslim2• 12 years ago

"CORTEX is our next generation platform that handles real-time financial data flows and notifications. Our stateless event-driven compute engine for dynamic data transforms is built entirely in Clojure and is crucial to our ability to provide a highly agile response to financial events."

Amazon is building a competitor to Bloomberg?

barkingcat• 12 years ago

I'm thinking financial flow as in the billions of credit card transactions every year and financial events as possible chargebacks, refunds, purchases, that amazon runs into every second.

Adrock• 12 years ago

That was my initial reading, too. Further searching for the CORTEX project revealed that it's probably an internal accounting system.

mikerichards• 12 years ago

I'm surprised at the industry adoption of Clojure. I'm not a Lispy, dynamic typing guy, but like the anti-OO stance that Rich and Clojure represents.

I wouldn't be surprised if Clojure has more "industry" adoption than Scala at this point.

Give me Clojure semantics (anti-OO, maps, vectors, and seqs) with some optional typing and a Python syntax then I'm there *

* that's just my preference, no need to convince me of anything other.

nbardy• 12 years ago

Well clojure having a lisp syntax allows an optional type system to be build as a library.

https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

dllthomas5• 12 years ago

Could you explain how that would have been prevented by another syntax?

erichmond• 12 years ago

https://github.com/clojure/core.typed has your optional typing. No suggestions for python syntax besides macros. Lots and lots of macros. :)

dominotw2• 12 years ago

Give me Clojure semantics (anti-OO, maps, vectors, and seqs) with some optional typing and a Python syntax then I'm there

That would be F#.

manojlds• 12 years ago

This is true. F# is pretty close to Python.

jeremyjh• 12 years ago

No not really. Optional type annotations are not the same thing as optional typing. F# is strongly and statically typed and if you expect it to be something else you will be frustrated.

malokai• 12 years ago

Julia has a Python syntax, optional typing, macros, maps, lists, expression quoting.

http://julialang.org/

kazinator• 12 years ago

Things like that have been tried:

Scheme's SRFI 49 (2003-2005, Final): "Indentation sensitive syntax": http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html

Lispin (2008): So utterly dead, we have to resort to the Internet Archive: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080517144846id_/http://www....

cl-2dsyntax: http://www.cliki.net/cl-2dsyntax (Annoying exclamation marks in this one, oops).

CGOL (1973!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGOL

The last one shows you just how long people have been unsuccessfully trying to promote Algol-like syntaxes for Lisp.

jimmcslim2• 12 years ago

You could have Lisp syntax on top of Python...

http://www.hylang.org

Foxboron2• 12 years ago

with some optional typing

I'm experimenting on this with Hype. It's barebones and does some whacky-don't-look-at-it macro "magic", but it works! Also trying to mimic core.typed's way of annotation.

Note: Just using python functions annotations with a typeannotation library to provide some runtime type checking. It's rather rad if i can say so my self.

https://github.com/Foxboron/Hype https://github.com/ceronman/typeannotations

nilved• 12 years ago

Hy looks really incredible, because it's like Clojure without the JVM. I really hope it becomes more popular. It might take a ClojureScript variant to compete, though.

If anybody on Arch Linux wants to give a Hy a try, I put together a PKGBUILD: python-hy.

nutate2• 12 years ago

From sources... Amazon is a heavy Java -> Scala shop. They are probably looking at Clojure to diversify as Scala is hitting some growing pains, but they can still leverage their large JVM expertise.

deepGem2• 12 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what are the pains with Scala that clojure will heal.

saosebastiao• 12 years ago

Amazon actually has a pretty interesting history with Lisp. I believe Steve Yegge has written about it before, but I'm not sure. It was pretty much completely gone by the time I got there though. Amazon went from almost completely C++/Lisp to almost completely Java/Ruby over the course of about 5 years.

I'm not directly in the dev space, but it appears as though the choice of languages that people use has far more to do with what Builder Tools will support than what people actually want to use. Teams only use Scala or Clojure if they are willing to build it using their convoluted Ant wrapper that doesn't make any sense.

l8erCode• 12 years ago

From sources... There's not much overlap between the Scala and Clojure folk, so nothing to do with any "growing pains". Scala's seeing much more uptake than Clojure.

codeonfire• 12 years ago

Amazon is literally thousands of shops with a libertarian CEO. The fastest way to end a career there is to try to force a company-wide standard language although many have tried and failed.

thirsteh• 12 years ago

Haskell looks pretty similar to Python :)

thescrewdriver• 12 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Clojure has more "industry" adoption than Scala at this point.

I would be very surprised if that was the case, based on what I've seen.

derefr• 12 years ago

The first thing I thought when I read the title is that they're going to run a Datomic-as-a-Service cluster. I'm still not sure that they're not, though a "stateless event-driven compute engine for dynamic data transforms" sounds more like something to do with AWS Lambda.

bkirkbri• 12 years ago

I've been dreaming of this since Datomic came out. I recommend it to our AWS account rep every chance I get.

bosky101• 12 years ago

    coming soon...storm-as-a-service (built on clojure)

juol• 12 years ago

Sigh.

Implemented a scheme in my undergraduate days (in C), had a small love affair with LISP in general (but none with girls ... probably related).

I'll be opinionated here:

It's not readable. It really isn't. You have to be in the thick of it to see the trees. Idiomatic doesn't cut it.

Operator heavy Haskell is more readable. Most of the modern functional languages read closer to the spoken word.

I'd rather be presented with a legacy OO code base, than an LISP one if the LOC was anything significant.

I hope I don't come across as disgruntled, I am but a mere man, and I know my limits.

And still have fond memories of bedding LISP.

fnordsensei• 12 years ago

I ran into LISP during my university days as well and was pretty much force fed it. I didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole after that. However, for various reasons, I ended up using Clojure to prototype a rather large project, and was surprised at how different it felt to work with it compared to my university days, in a positive way. Might be that I had matured, I dunno.

I don't feel that there's anything particularly magical with the paren being on the left hand side of the verb that automatically makes it less readable than when it is on the right hand side of the verb.

platz2• 12 years ago

I think its also the indentation along with everything is an expression, formatted as a list kind of thing.

Especially that alternating pairs business.

Having to know what is a macro and what is not affects understanding how arguments are evaluated, and basically everything is an argument differentiated only by position.

I've head one should read a lisp function not from the top town or outside in, but rather from the most indented part first, and then work your way up and out to discover the definitions.

thro1237• 12 years ago

Completely agree. Wrote some non-trivial amount of code in Clojure. But when I go back, it would take a long time to understand each line that I myself wrote. Java, for all its verbosity was readable. Going back to Python now.

nickik6• 12 years ago

So you did a little lisp in your undergraduate days and now you are a expert, compared to all the people who write clojure on a daily bases and are happy with it?

Also LISP (I assume you are talking about Scheme or Common Lisp and not the 60s langauge) is not the same as Clojure. It does share some syntax and some ideas but its also very diffrent in many ways.

You might prefer your legacy java in the simple case, buts lets talk again when that java code has to do concurrency or other complex problems.

Most of the modern functional languages read closer to the spoken word.

Its actually a absolut non-goal of clojure to 'read like the spoken word'. Its a goal of clojure to write code in a simple way, simple meaning a speration of concerns were each part is easy to reason about.

namdnay• 12 years ago

lets talk again when that java code has to do concurrency

For single-instance applications, sure. But for scalable systems, 90% of your concurrency is handled by whatever message broker you're using anyway. Tasks, Async processing, Blokcing Queues etc etc - they're all handled by your JMS provider.

ehurrell• 12 years ago

I've spent some time writing Clojure recently and I like it, though I think there can be readability difficulties quite easily, things can at times get twisted into a functional way of doing things (the capacity for abuse of this is maybe less than OO, but can be difficult to untangle). Obviously this varies with the coder, I've kept it to small projects and it has worked well.

cbp• 12 years ago

Cool story bro.

But if I may, I believe treating inanimate objects as women puts them off more than LISP.

weavejester3• 12 years ago

"Implemented a scheme in my undergraduate days (in C), had a small love affair with LISP in general... It's not readable. It really isn't."

Hang on. Your opinion is that Clojure isn't readable because you didn't find other Lisps readable when you were an undergraduate? But you haven't actually tried Clojure yourself?

I have tried Clojure, and my opinion is that it's easily the most readable programming language I've found.

Clojure has very strong opinions about complexity, which in Clojure parlance is a measurement of interconnectedness between components. The language is built around the idea of reducing complexity, about making things isolated and independent. Idiomatic Clojure code therefore tends to have a very flat structure consisting of isolated functions and data structures. It has a very high degree of code reuse, because it explicitly rejects encapsulation.

Clojure's syntax may be unusual, and individual forms are more information dense than many languages, however the structure of Clojure code is often much easier to understand, and for any non-trivial piece of code, that's the hardest part of comprehension.

When I come across a new Clojure library, I'll often find myself reading a bit of the docs, then heading into the source code to get an idea of how it operates. I rarely do this with an object orientated language, as OOP code tends to be deeper, more interconnected, and because of encapsulation, have more methods to understand. Java in particular is terrible for this.

eccp• 12 years ago

I've written applications using Java, Groovy, Clojure and Scala (in that order) and after Clojure, coding Scala felt specially horrible (yet another syntax to learn! ++: \ ~> and so on...).

Maybe Clojure feels odd for a few hours when coming from C-like syntax, but it becomes so obvious later on. I remember I felt terrified by the parens because I had not written anything serious in it.

oskarkv• 12 years ago

It really is readable, to me at least. I just wanted to say that because some people will perhaps read your comment and take it as true, because they too struggle with it at the moment, and then discard Clojure. But I'm just in love with it---yes, the syntax.

rikf• 12 years ago

I wonder what the sable referred to in the job description is referring to? Could it be SableVM.SableVM is a clean room implementation of the JVM but is no longer being maintained.

http://www.sablevm.org/

mabbo• 12 years ago

Ha, sadly no. Sable is the name of an internal Amazon product that the person posting the job must have forgotten was internal. Nothing secret afaik, just not something offered on AWS.

Amazon is hiring Clojure devs

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