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Comment by sigzero | Hacker News Reader

I have a question on Clojure in general. Is it Lisp people that are flocking to it or is it trending amongst other developers as well?

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I was previously using Python for most of my work, but I have been moving more and more to Clojure. It has been discussed before, but some of the functional flavor of Python left me looking for more. I briefly looked at CL, Scheme, and Haskell, and each had clear upsides but none really got me excited.

When I found Clojure, I felt it was more readable, had access to many interesting libraries, and had performance that was as good or better than Python in many cases. The ease of concurrency/parallelism is also very slick, and I suspect it will come in handy to me down the road in our multi-core future. The rise of Incanter, an R-like statistical package, pretty much sealed the deal.

The biggest headache has been the need to work with Java's build systems (not because they suck but because I have no interest in learning them beyond what's required for Clojure).

Try Leiningen http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen

I think it is both old-time Lisp'ers and JVM platform programmers looking for something more agile than Java.

I have been using Clojure for my work for several months and for me some of the big wins are:

1. easy to use existing Java libraries

2. lots of nice language features like destructuring, etc.

3. nice integration with Java and/or Scala projects with IntelliJ

4. fairly good runtime performance

And, a few hassles:

1. error stack traces have relatively little value.

2. The Clojure team is doing great work, but I still feel that the platform is not quite there yet compared with Java, Common Lisp, Haskell, etc.

I am in a patient mood in regards to Clojure: I use it for some things now, and expect my percentage use of Clojure over other languages will steadily increase over the next few years.

I use Clojure for a few odds and ends on a fairly regular basis now, but not having a Java background was a definite hurdle for me when I was starting to learn it. It was sometimes tough to tell if the problems I was having were Clojure related or Java related. The entire CLASSPATH paradigm was an issue for me until I realized what was going on.

Reading that "state of clojure" link below they know about the stack traces:

"Poor / incomprehensible error messages and stack traces are far and away the most common complaint."

Do you mind telling what are the few things that you used clojure for ?

For my current work task, I am using it for information extraction from Freebase which requires a lot of JSON manipulation. I was using Ruby but Clojure use is preferred at CompassLabs (both languages are well suited for Freebase data hacking).

I mostly use Java for Hadoop machine learning work, but I may transition to Clojure in the next few weeks (my CTO has suggested this).

Earlier this year, I added Clojure examples to my last book on the Semantic Web.

The state of clojure survey has some data:

http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Res...

So mostly java, ruby and python people, and relatively few lispers.

I compared those numbers to the TIOBE popularity of other languages and found that Ada and Scala developers are 7x more likely than their C# brethren to be interested in Clojure:

http://www.sharingatwork.com/2010/07/likelihood-a-user-of-on...

There was a survey about this (among other things): State of Clojure:

http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Res...

Quite a few Ruby and Python people trying Clojure out (much more than Lispers).

You are misled. There where not that many lispers in the first place so where should the come from? 5% come from Common Lisp guess how many Common lispers switched to scala. I don't know either but I don't belief that its more that 5%.

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