Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

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A. Thanks for the response.

B. Interesting. I saw a recent article on high-performance immutable data-structures[1], and wondered what the odds of Clojure implementing them might be. Sounds like you think the odds are minuscule.

C. I've heard great things about your book, and it is on my reading list! Thanks for writing it.

D. Given your hesitancy about the future of Clojure, what is your opinion of a more future-proof stack that has similar properties to Clojure (functional, simple, data-oriented, etc)? I can't think of many. ReasonML is interesting, but immature and definitely more complex than Clojure. Elixir seems to be promising, but I don't like the language, and I don't like being constrained to doing everything the BEAM way-- JVM is nice for high-perf computing when needed... Anyway, I'd appreciate your thoughts!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15005569

The chance of my implementation being folded into Clojure, as opposed to whatever Rich writes himself, is definitely tiny. But there's no telling when he might get around to it, so the best way to stay sane is to assume it will never happen.

Clojure occupies a really nice local maximum, and I don't think any other language is trying to compete for that niche. Since Clojure is just a Java library, it's relatively easy for you to extend or replace any part of it, so I don't think the future is a concern for anyone who enjoys the language and is motivated to use it.

Rather, I worry about the growth of the community, since that's largely predicated on the out-of-the-box experience. As an author and consultant who is focused on Clojure, that affects me far more than a company which builds its product using Clojure (assuming you're willing to hire people with an interest in FP and teach them the rest in their first month). I don't claim expertise in how to grow a community around a language, but it seems to be at best a part-time job for the people at Cognitect, which is not ideal.

I am seeing pretty healthy CLJS adoption, especially as NPM access becomes easier and easier. The things that are happening on the client side seem to be out front of the rest of the industry fairly consistently over the past few years. I think that bodes really well for the Clojure community overall.

> Elixir seems to be promising, but I don't like the language

Here is an interesting /r/clojure thread about Elixir vs Clojure: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/6wn6t5/new_clojuri...

What are your main issues with Elixir's syntax?

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