Comment by nwjsmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwjsmith | Hacker News Reader

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> I more often than not suggest moving from Clojure to anything else.

Rewrites are notoriously risky projects, I'm surprised you suggest this the majority of the time.

> you have to trust that the original programmers actually know the language enough to not create a massive disaster

This is my experience, but I've come across many coding disasters and none have been caused by misunderstanding the programming language. All have been due to poor software design or testing.

> Once this happens, you end up in a read-only code situation, and this is a problem because they leave the project with tons of bugs and downright stupid decisions.

Why have you pinned the blame on Clojure? What are the properties of Clojure that cause programs written in it to have so many bugs? Programming languages don't make decisions, let alone stupid ones.

> I joke that I know all 50 Clojure programmers in the US, and sadly, that's not much of an overstatement

This is a massive overstatement. Netflix, Apple, Soundcloud, and Walmart are all using Clojure. I work on a large team of Clojure developers, many of whom are located in the US. The Clojure community is large, healthy and growing. This is not an "esoteric" language.

> If you aren't located in SF, LA, or some other city that attracts talent

I work with Clojure developers all over the world, many in small towns in their respective country. My address hasn't been a factor for any tooling decision I've been a part of, it's a strange (overlooked?) criteria by which to judge technology.

> What are the properties of Clojure that cause programs written in it to have so many bugs?

Well, I can only speak from my own experience, but twice now I've personally seen enthusiastic talent python programmers create clojure projects which 'did all the things':

- used core-async heavily, including blocking channels that are never resolved in the UI.

- massive 'global application state' top level atoms that are mutated arbitrarily throughout the application

- massive complicated one line reduce/map/whatever where people are trying to be clever and reduce the lines of code, because 'fewer lines of code is better'.

I think it's telling when you get a 'walk through' from the person who wrote the code, and they have to stare at it, trying to figure out why it was they needed 10 different channels as they're explaining it.

After thinking about it quite a lot, my conclusion is that I would recommend against clojure for the same reason I would recommend against C: It's easy to mess it up.

Clojure allows you to create very complex applications; and you have all the tools to shoot yourself in the foot.

I don't think I'd tell people to migrate off clojure, but if the opportunity came to work on a new project, I would run away unless at least 50% of the people had actively used it before.

(and by comparison, my experience with a relatively novice team using elixir has been extremely positive; so yes, I do actually think this is a reflection on a clojure itself, not just 'insert any unknown programming language here').

You can write bad code using bad practices in any language. All the points you've made have absolutely nothing to do with Clojure, and are simply bad architecture.

Every language allows you to write complex applications, and shoot yourself in the foot. If I pick up Python tomorrow, and start writing a large application in it, it's pretty much guaranteed I'll make a mess.

Interesting that job postings for clojure are declining: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-clojure.html

And clojure isn't even mentioned in zdnet's most popular programming languages: http://www.zdnet.com/article/which-programming-languages-are...

And yet Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, CapitalOne, Netflix, Oracle, Red Hat, Two Sigma and a bunch of banks use it.

Makes you wonder how indicative those lists are of anything.

I think that's the point. Although Clojure has been adopted by a small cluster of big names it tends to be ignored further down the food chain. Search Indeed.co.uk's API for title:Clojure in London and you'll find 8 jobs compared with 378 for Python. For the UK as a whole it's 19 Clojure to 669 Python.

Python has been around a lot longer than Clojure though, especially if you count years of it being used in production. Clojure has only started seeing wide use about 5 years ago.

The fact that it's already used successfully at large companies shows that it is an effective language. Most companies that try it end up sticking with it. So, I'm not really seeing a problem here to be honest.

Clojure was released 10 years ago with 1.0 officially announced 8 and 1/2 years ago. Clojure adoption has been stagnant for a few years now. 8 jobs in London after 10 years, IMHO, represents a serious adoption problem.

Python was released 26 years ago, and it certainly didn't have the ecosystem or the popularity it has today 16 years ago.

There are certainly more than 8 jobs in London for Clojure. JUXT https://juxt.pro/index.html alone hires more people than that. Maybe you're just looking in the wrong places.

I can’t speak for the others, but at least for Amazon, for every clojure programmer you find, you’ll find 1000 using Java. Sure it’s a big name using it, but it’s only a few teams on a few projects. That’s kind of the point of SOA, it allows the team to do what they want without huge top level decisions on what technologies to adopt or abandon.

Wow, that is a shockingly steep dropoff! If you believe this chart, clojure will be extinct in another year. Could there be some other explanation than that clojure is really in a death spiral, like maybe Indeed has been growing faster in less developed markets or something?

If you believe that graph, then Java, Ruby and Shell are also on the way out. Nonsense.

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-java.html

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-ruby.html

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-shell.html

That is not interesting. If you are making the point that the rate of Clojure job growth is declining, it could be a data point in support of that hypothesis.

What do you think Clojure's absence from zdnet's list indicates?

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