Hacker News Reader

Comment by llambda | Hacker News Reader

They use Clojure and I believe ClojureScript on the frontend. (I'm not sure about Hadoop, when I had spoken with their devs before this didn't come up--but since they're already on the JVM such tools are a natural fit.)

They're one of the many success stories in the community of startups who have chosen Clojure as their primary weapon. (See also: Climate Corp, now owned by Monsanto.)

Lisp is having its victories, here and there, but notably in meaningful and economically real ways.

Edit: They DO NOT use ClojureScript, sadly. Unlike say, CircleCI or Prismatic, who both have very compelling stories with regard to using Clojure from the front to the backend.

View on HN

Frontend is currently Backbone + React, moving towards more React, written in CoffeeScript.

A bit of a shame it's not ClojureScript, to be honest. What's the rationale CoffeeScript?

I'm relatively new so I can't speak to the original rationale, but right now it fits our needs. I'd love to do some ClojureScript (or just ES2015 through Babel), but right now we're focusing on building stuff instead of playing with languages :)

> ...but right now we're focusing on building stuff instead of playing with languages

Which is exactly what's so compelling with regard to ClojureScript and say Om or any one of the React wrappers out there: you guys already use Clojure and ClojureScript and its libraries are incredibly pragmatic and designed for "real work". CoffeeScript would seem more like language play than ClojureScript, but of course I'm speaking as an outsider. :)

Also if you haven't already, take a look at David Nolen's recent talk on Om Next[1]. Personally if I were using Clojure on the backend, I'd be pushing hard for it on the frontend too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByNs9TG30E8

Personally, I'm not a big fan of CoffeeScript and it's something I brought up when I started, but at the end of the day you can write good and bad code in any language. I've watched that talk and found it really compelling, but I'd sooner get rid of Backbone than change languages. I've been following Dan Abramov's stuff pretty closely, the refinements in Redux seem to take the best parts of Om and Flux.

Just want to point out that I personally don't think Babel/ES6/ES2015 is ready for production yet. I just wrote a small library with it and ran into several hiccups with continuous integration, which was fixed by specifying a specific node and npm version of which both were I think just the default linux packages. If I ran into problems scratching the surface I can only imagine what headaches a deeper usage could cause. I realize this is a bit off topic, and would be interested to hear from someone whose done it, but I wouldn't want anyone to jump in head first and hit the bottom of the pool..

Can you explain why you feel it's a shame? We write a lot of Clojure at FarmLogs but there is certainly a time and a place for it.

We handle iOS push notifications with Ruby, a lot of data and image processing with Python, and even run .NET/Mono in a few areas. Our stack is very diverse and we do a really great job considering what the best technology for a particular problem might be.

Clojurescript is certainly interesting, but I wouldn't consider it a shame that our front-end isn't built with it. I love programming but at the end of the day you gotta remember that code is really just a means to an end.

It seems pretty obvious: You're giving up using one (great) language, which you already know, end-to-end. I can't think of a good reason to do this, especially when an entire UI revolution is being led, right now, in ClojureScript.

What possible reasons could there be for giving that up?

(See my other comment below as well.)

Anecdotal but whenever I see a lot of diversity in a stack it usually means there are a lot of different preferences on the development team, or that the stack was developed over a longer period of time with many members (and their preferences) coming and going. While yea, any SE should be able to pick up and run with any language, it is quite possible their team no longer has the same experience in Clojure or alternatively has way more experience in their current front runner (Python, Ruby, whatever). If that's the case I think it's quite reasonable (at least from a business stand point) to use alternate tools.

Coffescript is a powerful language meant for beginners, but you really need some experience with it to understand its quirks and that a lot of it should be avoided.

So basically, it's JavaScript with a compile step that doesn't do static analysis.

But back in 2012 when the first lines of FarmLogs were written, it was pretty cool. And that's a lesson in itself about why it really doesn't matter what stack you use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com