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finalfantasia

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clojure.org 4y ago

State of Clojure 2022

finalfantasia
8pts0
clojure.org 7y ago

Clojure 1.10 release

finalfantasia
355pts94
Lisp as an Alternative to Java (2000) 5 years ago

The bigger issue though is wasting time wrapping Java libraries and most comments I see about Clojure interop talk as if there is no cost to it.

You are not forced to "waste time" wrapping Java libraries. As a matter of fact, thanks to the interop features that are well thought out, using Java libraries directly via the interop is encouraged and preferred to wrappers (Java Time API is a good example.) You may _choose_ to write wrappers for Java libraries if they make consuming these libraries in your code a bit nicer.

Clojure has good foundations but the ecosystem never really developed.

There's no separate ecosystem for Clojure(Script). The established ecosystems such as JVM, .NET, and JavaScript _are_ the Clojure ecosystem. The creator of Clojure(Script) realized that it would be practically impossible to build an ecosystem from scratch without significant investment (Sun spent billions of marketing dollars alone in Java) and thus deliberately chose to make Clojure(Script) a language hosted on well-developed platforms such as JVM, .NET, and JavaScript. Also because of this focus on being a hosted language, he went to great lengths to ensure the interop with its hosting platforms is as seamless as possible. If you need an example for awkward interop with Java, try Scala.

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Six Years of Professional Clojure 5 years ago

To be fair, this is not unique to Clojure. You need to deal with stack traces no matter what as long as you're using any programming language that targets the JVM (even statically type-checked languages like Scala). There are some great articles [1][2] that discuss various simple techniques helpful for debugging and dealing with stack traces.

[1] https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/notes-on-debugging-clojur...

[2] https://cognitect.com/blog/2017/6/5/repl-debugging-no-stackt...

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Hands-on Scala Programming 6 years ago

I cannot answer your question. Since you love Python, I guess you don't have any problem with dynamic type-checking. You also mentioned Scheme, I take that as you don't mind parentheses either. :)

If you would like to try something that's closest to Scheme and has access to the rich libraries in both the Python and Java ecosystems, give Clojure a try. You have access to the Java libraries out of the box and, with libpython-clj [1], you get access to your familiar Python libraries.

[1] https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

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Fancy Clojure REPL 6 years ago

I think what @iLemming meant is that she/he doesn’t understand the appeal of having a fancy REPL _UI_ (mostly virtual terminal emulator-based readline implementations) and working with it _directly_ as opposed to sending forms from your editor of choice to a REPL server.

I kind of hold the same opinion. Being more powerful, feature-rich, flexible than readline implementations, editors are, by design, more suited to editing forms. And, I believe, “sending forms from your editor to the REPL” is what the “REPL-driven development” encourages.

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Opensourcing the Universal Package Manager 7 years ago

As a regular user and promoter of REPL.it, I like it very much and therefore submitted two PR’s [1][2] after seeing a blog post about how to contribute to it [3].

Unfortunately, those PR’s have been lingering up there for the past 4 months without any meaningful feedback. I fully understand that you are a business and therefore there are priorities but it would be great to get any kind of feedback on them in order for me proceed with further actions one way or another.

Anyway, thank you for providing such a nice tool for free and open-sourcing it!

[1] https://github.com/replit/polygott/pull/28

[2] https://github.com/replit/prybar/pull/30

[3] https://repl.it/site/blog/elisp

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Ask HN: Best Lisp for software development? 7 years ago

Based on your description, the Lisp that you're looking for should:

  - be the most modern one
  - have a robust ecosystem
    - package management
    - tooling
  - can be used for building production-ready software
  - be an easy sell to businesses
Clojure checks every single bullet point on that list; it
  - is *the most modern* Lisp that's designed from ground up (no historical baggage/cruft)
  - is hosted on *the Java platform* (i.e., "the Java world"), which is so far the most robust enterprise software ecosystem. This means that you have access to the most robust package management system (Leiningen/Maven), the most battle-tested and production-quality libraries, and the most powerful development tools (e.g., IntelliJ IDEA), and etc.
  - is created by a pragmatic/practical guy who wants to build production-ready software. It's not the result of an academic research/experiment/thesis.
  - is the result of a trade-off that makes it an easier sell to businesses. Businesses tend to be more conservative when it comes to choosing a platform to invest on and usually prefer the ones that are battle-tested, well-established, and well-supported. As of right now, it's the Java platform. No other enterprise software ecosystem can hold a candle to it.
Of course, you don't have to take my word for it, see what others have to say about Clojure.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clojure#Popularity

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Productivity brought by Clojure [slides] 7 years ago

It seems to me what you’re struggling with is functional programming (the paradigm) instead of Clojure (the language or grammar) itself. This is pretty common for people who are used to the C-like languages. I strongly recommend reading “Clojure for the Brave and True” [1] (especially, Part 2) to anyone who is getting started on either functional programming and/or Clojure.

[1] https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/

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State of Clojure Survey 2019 Analysis 7 years ago

I was passively introduced to Clojure when I joined my current team at my current company a few years ago. After spending 5 years in a humongous, horribly-maintained Java code base, and a short period of time with a new-ish Scala code base that was littered with code written in almost all kinds of programming paradigms (procedural, object-oriented, and functional) and then being intimidated by the incidental complexity of the language itself prior to this transition, I was frustrated to realize the cruel fact that I had to learn another JVM language that feels even “weirder” and more “complicated” than Scala. At first, I had similar questions as you have now: “What makes this ‘ugly’ language so special that one of our smartest team leads preferred it to, say, Scala, Go, or Rust?” It was not until I watched one [1] of “Rich Hickey’s Greatest Hits” [2] did Clojure finally “click” with me. It’s all of those principles that were applied and the values that were upheld when Rich Hickey designed this elegant language. I cannot reiterate all of them here. Go watch those talks and give this language a serious try. You might end up falling in deep love with it just as I did. :-)

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

[2] https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits

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Firefox 58 8 years ago

Until they provide a decent UI/UX to do that, you can use about:performance for now.

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