It should go without saying that this should not actually reflect poorly on Clojure as a language.
Bad clojure code is unmaintainable spaghetti code; which gets worse over time, as people attempt to 'patch on' fixes without doing the heavy lifting of trying to figure out:
- What was the original author actually trying to do?
- Why the heck did they do it like this?
- How do we create the same functionality and prove it works with these rubbish tests that only test the individual units of work, not the application function?
- Why is it all in one giant file?
I've never seen code bases descend into chaos as fast as our clojure ones have.
Nice, elegant clojure is a pleasure to work with for personal projects, but I'm never using it professionally again.
You might argue it doesn't reflect on the language, but I think it does. Given what I've seen, I'd argue that clojure has an inherent complexity that results in poor code quality outcomes during the software maintenance cycle.
...specifically, sections of bad code have a disproportionately negative effect (compared to other languages) on the surrounding code and negatively impact the entire project's code quality.
You hack something out for a deadline? You better go back and clean it up, because if you don't that codebase is screwed. shrug That's just been my experience over the last year on three different code bases.
Is this a function of the teams or the language?
(The impression I've gotten is that the persistent data structures are very nice, and the language has some good ideas to go with them, but overall it didn't entice me away from Scheme or Common Lisp. But that impression doesn't explain why you had this bad experience with troublesome Clojure code.)
Two main reasons for this are that Clojure is immutable by default, and it has minimal syntax. Immutability allows projects to be naturally compartmentalized. You can do safely do local reasoning on parts of the project. Meanwhile, simple and consistent syntax means that it's easier to read and understand the code written by others. There are far less language quirks to remember than in most languages.
I also find that the editor integration with the REPL is a huge plus as well. Whenever I run into code that I'm not sure about, I can just run it and see what it does.
In fact I've had these reactions at various times to code in every language I've worked in (including Clojure, to be sure), but I don't agree with your argument about Clojure having greater than average inherent complexity.
Once you get comfortable with parens, the core seq functions, and even a basic understanding of laziness & immutability, so much of the inherent complexity you find in many programs just goes away. Well -- most of the time. Again, Clojure is not going to stop you from negating these niceties with bad decisions.
The one thing I'd maybe admit to it being a little above average on is the temptation to over-engineer due to novelty or feeling clever. Let's rub some core.async on it! Parallelize all the things! It's actually easier to do this because of the lack of inherent complexity in Clojure -- as the author mentions, everything is oriented around simple maps & lists, so juggling them and squeezing them through Rube Goldberg machines of transformations and mystery macros is definitely a thing you can do.
But, ideally, you just learn to . . . not do that. Like abusing Ruby metaprogramming.
Tell me you've never picked up a piece of clojure code and gone, WTF does this do? What are these global channels for? Why is the whole application constantly updating a top level full-application-state atom? Why are we blocking indefinitely with some magical invisible state hidden in a closure as we iterate over a collection of objects to process?
If you have a beautiful clojure code base, it's fantastic...
But, ideally, you just learn to . . . not do that
I get it; don't do that.
...but what do you do when it's too late, and someone has already made those bad decisions?
Where are the debugging tools to help you figure out what's going on, and the refactoring tools to help isolate code units and replace them?
I mean, sure, you could argue that's an issue in any language, but all I can say is that I've used a lot of other languages, and the only other similar experience I've had was working with perl.
I think something that would help the Clojure community improve, especially with regard to introducing Clojure to a team is to ask why this kind of thing doesn't happen in Python.
I know Python doesn't come with atoms, but you could certainly stick the whole application state in a global variable. You wouldn't though if you're a working programmer with a modicum of experience on your first Python project. Do people just see some new idioms and forget everything they already knew about programming?
Python does have closures, and you certainly could write one that blocks due to some hidden state or does something stupid involving multithreading. This isn't seen as a problem with the language though; it's seen as a sign that the person who did it might need to work more closely with someone more experienced or that the team needs better code reviews.
Huh. I thought this is what Om Next did to great success.
* https://medium.com/adstage-engineering/realtime-apps-with-om...
[edit] i misunderstood your argument. Your not implying a single state is bad, your saying their is nothing in python to deal with it.
Why are you even using FP at that point?
Global application state should be represented in a single root storage; the application data store (ie. database), and the interactions with it should be controlled and sanitised.
If you have a thousand little places across your code base updating and reading from the database, that's horrible code too, in java or in clojure...
Modern UI frameworks are carefully controlled access and update to the display state for a UI; they happen in a controlled and orderly manner specifically to prevent the chaos you get otherwise; if not, you're doing it wrong.
This section in the om docs covers their solution, which is quite elegant: https://github.com/omcljs/om/wiki/Quick-Start-(om.next)#glob...
(notice, you don't just reach out and update atoms directly by hand; there's nothing wrong with having a global application state; that's a good thing, but directly interacting with it is not)
Of course there's no stopping a determined person from writing bad code, but there's a big difference between various languages in how easy it is to accidentally or unknowingly writing bad code.
I switched to F# and "get" FP much better now. I'd know what I was doing if I ever switched back to Clojure. But I have no good reason to personally, and all the aforementioned reasons not to professionally.
Couldn't you say the same thing about most languages?
However, I'd be interested in which parts of Racket and CL klibertp thinks are making them better languages than clojure.
I can't prove any of this; it's all anecdotal, but I thought I'd mention that your experience might not be typical.
Why not? If a language's goal is to be practical (as is Clojure's), then it should take practical concerns into consideration. This is something that the Java community definitely gets right.
Because someone who has never heard of map/reduce/filter/partial will need to do some studying to leverage the spine of the language in order to make living, breathing code-organisms.
We've hired a number of devs for our Clojure projects, and none of them knew Clojure when they started. We found that this process has worked very well for us.