Hacker News Reader

Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised their backend is written in closure. I would think it make hiring developers much harder (smaller group of people know it) and training people a lot harder. You can jump on to a project and learn enough go to fix bugs in a day or so (less than a week for sure). I am not sure the same could be said about closure.

View on HN

It definitely did not make hiring harder. In fact, it was probably easier, because at the time, Clojure was more unique. The people interested in working in rare languages tend to be above average.

Also, I would avoid optimizing TTFBugFix the wrong way. You want the system to be easy to fix because it's well designed & documented, not because it's written in a language you already know.

What characteristics about these people makes them above average? I need some goals to set my sights on :)

Intellectual curiosity, and a desire to experiment with new languages to be more productive/write cleaner code.

I speak from personal experience: it's a lot easier to find a good Clojure guy than to find a good Rails guy for example. Because there's not many Clojure shops, you tend to get the good and motivated people :) As per my Rails example, it's full out there of Rails shop.. you're just another one.

I think you overestimate how hard it is to pick up a new language. Even the designer at Circle (https://twitter.com/dannykingme) learned enough ClojureScript within the first month to build components completely independently. It only required a little extra engineering time to hook things up properly.

From the last Clojure/conj (conference), it definitely seems that Clojure is at, or even past, an inflection point.

I doubt any companies (that are themselves, aside from tech stack, appealing to work for) are having trouble at least getting a lot of interest for Clojure positions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com