Clojure 2014 Year in Review

http://stuartsierra.com/2015/01/02/clojure-2014-year-in-review

by fogus • 12 years ago

261 115 12 years ago

jeremiep4• 12 years ago

This is great! Glad to see more Clojure adoption in the corporate world. It's definitely well deserved!

I used it only once at work to develop a stress test for a Java based game server. It was great fun to build, worked like a charm and ended up taking less than a thousand lines of code to implement the communications, bots and their execution scripts.

Furthermore, the company just bought a copy of The Joy of Clojure and there's already a bunch of my coworkers interested in reading it. Good times!

virmundi• 12 years ago

A word of advice with Joy of Clojure: take up meditation. That book is surprisingly dense. I had to research topics ever few paragraphs. It is not a beginners books. Rather pair it with Clojure for the Brave and True. Combined the language comes alive.

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.braveclojure.com/&sa...

jeremiep4• 12 years ago

Good advice! The book is definitely dense and packed with useful information. I didn't read Clojure for the Brave and True yet, I'll add it to my reading list, thanks!

However, I found it easier to digest than Let Over Lambda which was a real mind bender for me a few years ago. Being a LISP fan before learning about Clojure definitely made learning it much, much easier. It also made me appreciate the language early on for its impressive beauty, elegance and simplicity.

reitzensteinm• 12 years ago

Similar experience here. I wrote a log parser with indexing and hierarchical cache invalidation to deal with larger than memory amounts of logs quickly and in a natural coding style, and after that I was hooked. Tiny code base, good performance, little need for ugly hacks.

My latest site is now written in it and clojure script, and I see no reason to not continue. Though cljs is definitely a few years behind on the stability curve.

jeremiep4• 12 years ago

I haven't had any major issues with cljs yet. I'm using it for personal side-projects where I prototype random ideas along with Om and React.

I've had some issues with the Austin REPL however, there is sometimes random disconnections and it was hard to setup the first time, but using it is so much fun it completely shadows these issues.

zeroDivisible• 12 years ago

For everybody who wants to start Clojure, I know that there are loads of good resources, but the best one which I had found is this online MOOC:

http://iloveponies.github.io/120-hour-epic-sax-marathon/

Teaches you TDD in Clojure and "forces" you to use git / Github / Travis to test your code.

Highly recommended.

edit: style.

JBiserkov2• 12 years ago

I highly recommend this course as well.

I believe the official link is http://mooc.cs.helsinki.fi/clojure

stevepm• 12 years ago

Do you know of any other TDD MOOCs out there? It's my preferred learning method. Thanks!

JBiserkov2• 12 years ago

Microsoft/Nokia is using Clojure to power the web services behind MixRadio.

neilprosser• 12 years ago

I'm from MixRadio and we're actually about 40 engineers, not all doing Clojure. Pretty much all of our new micro-service work is done using Clojure. Not sure how many others in wider Microsoft/Nokia.

Edit: making it clearer.

nickik• 12 years ago

I know that the Nokia Map people in Berlin use clojure.

1472• 12 years ago

I'd like to add that I'm starting a Clojure job next Monday at a "boring" company that you would never think would have a heavy reliance on Clojure. I think that there's a demand for Clojure developers that is unmet. I keep getting recruiters and etc. messaging me about Clojure.

checksum404• 12 years ago

Citi?

1472• 12 years ago

Nah, it's at a company called RentPath. They own Rent.com, Apartment Guide, etc. I'll be a remote engineer.

mikerichards8• 12 years ago

The amount of traction that Clojure is getting in companies like Walmart, Amazon, and elsewhere is surprising and impressive.

Great work Clojure community.

dmix• 12 years ago

Not mentioned in the article but most interesting to me this year is how these guys are "building a bank from scratch in Brazil with Datomic and Clojure": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lm3K8zVOdY

The future looks bright for the language, especially with applications like this.

coding4all3• 12 years ago

I've been writing Clojure almost exclusively for 3 or 4 years and it's just amazing. Core.async, Quil, Om, Chestnut, ClojureScript, ClojureScript + Apache Cordova, and I could go on forever.

geophile3• 12 years ago

Just learning Clojure now. Would you do us newbies a favor and say a few words about the projects you mention: what they do, why we should look into them? There is much to learn, so a shove in the right direction(s) would be useful.

coding4all3• 12 years ago

Core.async is an official Clojure and ClojureScript library that takes channels from the Go language and adds them to Clojure in a much nicer way.

http://clojure.com/blog/2013/06/28/clojure-core-async-channe...

All of the operations are expressions (not statements)

This is a library, not syntax

alts! is a function (and supports a runtime-variable number of operations)

Priority is supported in alt

Quil is a Clojure and ClojureScript library for creating interactive drawings and animations using Processing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_%28programming_lang...).

Om is actually an interface to Facebook's React. Ironically, the terminology, and the feature set of Om has little, if any, resemblance to React. Om specifically transforms Clojure data so that it can be represented in a way that React can uderstand.

In the Clojure world, we build on top of React and stay away from anything that resembles JavaScript and it's behavior. React provides a virtual DOM and we just use Clojure to talk to the rendering engine.

https://gist.github.com/runexec/6efb322f29fc790a98a1

Chestnut allows live coding in the browser. This means all changes are visible without having to reload the page.

2 Minute video of Om using Chestnut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI3fJKmvgq4

https://github.com/om-cookbook/om-cookbook

Apache Cordova is the Apache License version of Adobe PhoneGap. ClojureScript compiles to highly optimized JavaScript already, so you can make mobile apps using ClojureScript and Apache Cordova.

city41• 12 years ago

I recommend checking out Reagent as an Om alternative. I've tried both and like how simple and "pure" Reagent is. There's almost nothing to it (where as Om is a bit more complicated)

davexunit4• 12 years ago

Since Clojure adoption is picking up, what about convincing management to use other Lisps now? Clojure is okay, but I much prefer Scheme (Guile, Racket, Chicken, etc.).

shaunxcode• 12 years ago

Remember that the JVM is the major selling point for clojure. (that said there are many other lisps for the JVM)

davexunit4• 12 years ago

I'm hoping it's just the gateway drug. The JVM is a monster.

jeremiep4• 12 years ago

Not only the JVM (which is rock-solid at this point) but also immutability, persistent data structures, the separation between values and identities and its solution to the expression problem which is protocols.

I was at first turned down by the JVM (not knowing any better back then), but it turns out being a hosted language is one of the best aspects of Clojure.

new2scheme• 12 years ago

Between Guile, Chicken and other *nix Schemes which would you recommend for general scripting and admin task automaton? Which has a more expansive library ecosystem? I found that Clojure isn't the best fit for thEse tasks because of the start-up time and the JVM dependency.

davexunit4• 12 years ago

Have you read http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/01/07/an-opinionated-guide... ? It might help you weigh your options and make a pick that best suits your preferences. I don't think you could go wrong with Guile or Chicken. I use Guile pretty much exclusively and it has a good POSIX API, so I write scripts in Scheme instead of Bash or Perl or whatever.

mquander• 12 years ago

Racket has loads of libraries and I used it happily for a long time for automating everyday tasks (recently I switched to Python since we use it at work and I needed to learn it.)

handojin• 12 years ago

disclaimer: no actual experience of this but...

the scheme shell maybe? scsh.net

here's some snippets:

http://scsh.net/contrib/wiki/CodeSnippets.html

current_call2• 12 years ago

Racket is wonderful.

mikerichards8• 12 years ago

Probably not yet. Clojure's greatest selling point to management is still that you can just drop in a jar.

But Clojure has a strong opinion on immutability and functional programming. I'm not sure those Schemes do.

In any case, if you were to introduce a Scheme, I would do Racket for it's significant community within the larger Scheme ecosystem.

davexunit4• 12 years ago

Clojure has a strong opinion on immutability and functional programming. I'm not sure those Schemes do.

Scheme programmers emphasize the very same things.

I would do Racket for it's significant community within the larger Scheme ecosystem.

Yeah, Racket would make sense, though I'm personally attached to Guile.

gte525u• 12 years ago

There is a r7rs scheme (kawa) that runs interpreted on the jvm and can compile down to class files.

dominotw3• 12 years ago

I am not sure I would use RedMonk Index as popularity measure.

Most people who I see using clojure are bored ruby programmers and they bought their open source culture with them to clojure.

Clojure is not even in top 50 on TIOBE index http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

swannodette4• 12 years ago

Most Clojure programmers are Java programmers - http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-...

Even though this is 2 years old it's still the case that the Clojure folks are heavily dominated by users who have already invested in the JVM. The other largest group seems to be split evenly between Python & Ruby as reflected in this survey.

puredanger2• 12 years ago

Red Monk's inputs are at least numbers based on tracks left by actual programmers and not meaningless search results.

The "index" is calculated (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/progra...) by searching the 25 highest ranked web sites on Alexa which have a search box and meet some basic criteria then magically weighting them as follows:

- Google - 7.7% - YouTube - 7.4% - Baidu - 7.1% - Amazon - 6.8% - Google India - 6.5% - Yahoo Japan - 6.2% - Hao123.com - 5.8% - Google Germany - 5.5% - Microsoft Bing - 5.2% - Google Japan - 4.9% - Google UK - 4.6% - AliExpress - 4.3% - Alibaba - 4.0% - Amazon Japan - 3.7% - Google Brazil - 3.4% - 360.cn - 3.1% - Google Italia - 2.8% - Amazon Germany - 2.5% - Google Spain - 2.2% - Amazon UK - 1.8% - Google Mexico - 1.5% - Google Canada - 1.2% - Google Ad Services - 0.9% - Amazon China - 0.6% - Google Poland - 0.3%

I might buy that a general internet or e-commerce search might tell you one (low-signal, high-noise) piece of data about popularity. Some of these sites seem highly questionable to tell you anything meaningful. Garbage in / garbage out.

I think use of more specific numbers from sites like Stack Overflow or GitHub seems far more likely to give you relevant information.

mikerichards8• 12 years ago

Are we beginning to see the tipping point where mainstream corporates are starting to question whether traditional OO is the right way to go?

Not to start a flame war, but it seems that Clojure/Rich's strong anti-OO stance is almost a selling point of the language.

IMHO, OO just put some lipstick on the procedural pig.

dominotw3• 12 years ago

Are we beginning to see the tipping point where mainstream corporates are starting to question whether traditional OO is the right way to go?

Nope. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

First functional language on that list is F# at 19.

RussianCow• 12 years ago

"beginning to see" != "already at". There is TONS of existing code written in OO languages--you can't expect functional languages to replace that overnight. However, functional languages like Clojure and F# are starting to become more common, even in corporate environments. (I know eBay and Wallmart use Clojure for some of their projects, among others.)

I don't know if the trend will continue (my guess is yes), but you shouldn't dismiss it just because C, C++, and Java are still the most widely-used programming languages in the world.

dj-wonk2• 12 years ago

Yes? No? Let's avoid false binary choices. A better question here is "to what degree?"

That list's methodology seems somewhat arbitrary, but let's go with it.

If you look at many top languages in use by a lot of companies, many have increasing functional aspects: Java (#2), Python (#8), and R (#12). (I may have left out some, too.) Python has many functional aspects. Java 8 brings lambda expressions. R has first-class functions and lazy evaluation.

I'd say this is less about functional programming "destroying" OO and more about programmers reaching for some aspects of FP when OO brings too much complexity. For example, why create a new class just to write an event handler? Even Java is getting the picture!

seanmcdirmid19• 12 years ago

Clojure is continuing the LISP subculture that has existed for a long time, nothing new here.

OO will continue to be successful for accessibility reasons, and it's demise will continue to be predicted to have arrived.

twic3• 12 years ago

I think you're right about OO's continued survival. I also think mikerichards is right that OO is just technicolor procedural programming. Moreover, i think these two things are related: OO is immortal in part because it's straightforward and obvious, just like procedural programming.

But i don't think Clojure is just continuing the (equally immortal!) LISP subculture. I think LISP is growing by recruiting people from OO-ish languages like Java, Python, and Ruby, rather than from existing LISPs. This is the first time in a long time that a LISP has done that. It's also the first time in a long time that a LISP has got even this glimmer of mainstream use. pg wrote 'Beating the Averages' in 2001 [1], and even after that, everyone still thought LISPers were freaks. But announce you're using Clojure in production today, and nobody bats an eye.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

mikerichards8• 12 years ago

I wasn't predicting a demise, just like I wouldn't predict the demise of C, COBOL, or other procedural languages.

What I meant was is there a significant portion of corporate decision makers that don't look at OO as the default programming methodology, than say 10 years ago?

I'm actually pretty surprised at the uptake of Clojure, especially compared to Scala, which would intuitively be the next language for corporate adoption on the JVM.

I think there are many developers and decision makers that are looking for simplicity now.

swannodette4• 12 years ago

Not sure what you are talking about - Clojure has a great many OO-ish constructs - even local state! The only thing that's really missing is deep support for static forms of inheritance.

As programmer that feels quite at home with OO idioms - Clojure distills it down to the parts I actually like.

dj-wonk2• 12 years ago

Well, not all LISPs are considered friendly from our modern context. Just consider my favorite 'love to hate' Emacs Lisp example: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DestructiveOperations Check out the bit where using 'sort' incorrectly can self-modify the function. Anyhow, maybe Clojure is "just" another LISP, perhaps, but it is really nice due to many small improvements making a big difference.

jules• 12 years ago

In order for that to be a testable prediction the terms need to be made precise. OO is a famously vague concept with many different concrete incarnations. There's single dispach vs multiple dispatch. Within single dispatch you have prototype based vs class based. You have objects as a record of closures. With multiple dispatch you have dispatch on class, or predicate dispatch, or full pattern matching. There's the question whether some form of identity or state is part of OO. The concept is broad enough that you can easily stretch it so that almost any modern language is OO in some form. A functional or logic programming language where functions can be split into multiple cases with pattern matching is arguably just a generalization of predicate dispatch.

If on the other hand we restrict the term to languages where values are essentially identity + a record of methods (whether through the indirection of a class v-table or directly stored in the value as in prototype based languages), I do think that model has largely run its course. It will certainly remain popular in the near future, but people are increasingly realizing that modeling everything as a record of methods + identity (+ state?) isn't a good way to do it. There are certain things that lend themselves to that way of modeling, but most things are best modeled in some other way. Records of functions + identity is just one particular data type among many, and it's not any more special than any other data type. Modeling everything as an object is like TCL where you model everything as a string. OOP is nice on the surface because you have some vague analogy to real world objects, but that does more harm than good. It is similar to agile or TDD where people try to sit down at the computer and immediately start typing code without any careful thinking beforehand. Like TDD and agile, OO also facilitates that kind of programming because people can take the concepts in their head and immediately start typing class definitions. It works for easy problems, but even there it does not lead to a pretty end result (one of the symptoms that sticks out most is the question 'on which class does this method belong?'). Rather than designing your program to model the real world, it usually works much better to design your program around the problem you're trying to solve. Rather than starting with the real world and making an analogue to it in your program, you start with the problem you're trying to solve and come up with a data model that facilitates solving that problem. A famous example of the former style gone wrong is Ron Jeffries who tried to write a sudoku solver with an OO + TDD approach in a series of blog posts. He modeled his program with classes that seem natural for the problem, and he wrote tests for those. Unfortunately writing a sudoku solver is not one of those problems where you can just start banging out code without any thought and get it to work, so he got stuck because he did not think about how to actually solve the problem, he only thought about how to model the real world with OO.

geophile3• 12 years ago

Yes, that's exactly what it did. I started my programming career in FORTRAN and BASIC, and really appreciated the advances of structured programming and the control structures in the languages that supported it -- the Algol family, Pascal, C. I see OO as doing more of the same, providing language constructs for commonly used patterns, and I think it is very successful at doing that. I think that a lot of the OO hatred comes from OOs failure at meeting goals that were claimed during the peak of the OO hype cycle. I think that another, well-justified source of hatred is the architecture astronaut stuff -- AbstractFactoryProxyFactory and the like.

Personally, I like Clojure (which I am just learning now) in spite of the lack of objects. I think that the ability to write a Point class, encapsulate the coordinates, and expose an API is great. In my opinion, representing a Point as a vector or map, and then having a set of unassociated functions operating on these point-like collections sacrifices some good ideas that came from object-orientation.

adambard• 12 years ago

Personally, I like Clojure (which I am just learning now) in spite of the lack of objects. I think that the ability to write a Point class, encapsulate the coordinates, and expose an API is great. In my opinion, representing a Point as a vector or map, and then having a set of unassociated functions operating on these point-like collections sacrifices some good ideas that came from object-orientation.

Since you mentioned you were learning, I thought I'd share that, although I like functions-on-data as much as the next guy, I often use protocols and records for tasks like this, generally for no reason other than organization and self-documentation:

    (defprotocol Pointy
      (add-vectors [this other])
      ; ...
    )

    (defrecord Point
      Pointy
      (add-vectors [{this-x :x this-y :y} {other-x :x other-y :y}]
        (->Point (+ this-x other-x) (+ this-y other-y)))
      ;...
    )

I think this has more to do with type-safety than object-orientation though.

lmm• 12 years ago

Scala remains ahead of Clojure because it permits traditional OO. OO is wonderful; try writing some programs in a language that forces you to do proper OO (e.g. Smalltalk). Even if you ultimately decide you prefer non-OO, you'll learn techniques that make your programs better, and you'll at least be able to understand the thing you're criticising.

psykotic2• 12 years ago

OO is wonderful; try writing some programs in a language that forces you to do proper OO (e.g. Smalltalk).

Have you tried implementing a numeric tower with proper OO in Smalltalk? Would you describe the experience as wonderful and the program as beautiful? Rinse and repeat for any other problem that requires simultaneous pattern matching on several values.

I do think Smalltalk's style of single-receiver message passing is a sweet spot for structuring many kinds of programs.

gengstrand2• 12 years ago

Scala does have more support for OO than Clojure with traits, case classes and pattern matching, and generics but Clojure does have enough support for OO for basic service creation. See https://github.com/gengstrand/clojure-news-feed as an example where Clojure's defprotocol, defrecord, defmulti, and defmethod are used to implement a basic CRUD style RESTful API for 4 entities in about 300 lines of code.

swannodette4• 12 years ago

Clojure's anti-OO stance is far subtler than people seem to understand. It's primarily about not reaching for classes as a first tool and eliminating local state (and even this is allowed!)

However there are times when the OO approach makes sense and you have a full range of tools from multimethods to protocols. In ClojureScript you even have Self-like functionality in the form of `specify`.

mikerichards8• 12 years ago

Multimethods and Protocols seem to get better results than what OO is trying to achieve...at least when it comes to polymorphism.

dkersten4• 12 years ago

Is there any documentation on "specify"? I've seen it used from time to time (eg in your Om code), but the only documentation I've found is the dev wiki page[1].

[1] http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/specify+i.e.+reify+for...

ww520• 12 years ago

Not to start a flame war, but it seems that Clojure/Rich's strong anti-OO stance is almost a selling point of the language. IMHO, OO just put some lipstick on the procedural pig.

<sarcasm> Not to start a flame war, IMHO functional bigots just like to incite language wars rather than solving real problems. </sarcasm>

thom• 12 years ago

Are people finding it easy/easier to fill clojure positions?

terranstyler• 12 years ago

I work 50%+ in Clojure as an IT Consultant and here in Europe it's not that easy to find a company that uses Clojure and embraces its benefits.

When I use clojure, it's typically for companies who need to get something done and then I choose clojure to do it, but only once someone specifically asked me for clojure (but it was an American company).

I don't find it as easy to work as clojure guy in Europe.

In comparison, in the US there's much more demand but many companies refrain from remote contracting Europeans (even though I think my background is quite good ML, Data Science, Statistics, ..)

So IMO the TL;DR is: filling clojure positions is only a problem in the US, not in Europe.

JackMorgan• 12 years ago

My team which uses Clojure recently decided to grow. I regularly attend a local Clojure focused Meetup, and it is very easy to find interested developers there. The Meetup, which meets in Philadelphia, has over 150 members, so at least there is a large number of people interested.

zubairq• 12 years ago

Clojure is awesome. However I don't want it to become too popular, as then those who do currently use it will lose all our magical powers if everyone has access to it :)

gengstrand2• 12 years ago

I am surprised that no one here has yet mentioned Clojure in connection with Big Data. At OSCON 2014 ( see http://glennengstrand.info/analytics/fp ), I was first introduced to Cascalog which allows you to write Hadoop map reduce jobs in Clojure. Both Cloudera and Hortonworks support it.

puredanger2• 12 years ago

We maintain a growing list of companies using Clojure here - http://clojure.org/companies

Clojure 2014 Year in Review

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