Hacker News Reader

Comment by slifin | Hacker News Reader

I need a Clojure job, their technology seems like it's from the year 3000 and I'm over here in PHP land banging rocks together

Their idiomatic database can travel through time, they focus intently on composition, referential integrity, immutability to the database level

They have specs which can validate things typically better than types and they compose

They focus on shared protocols which gives them amazing leverage, like the internet works because we all cooperate via the http protocol

I've been looking quite closely at datomic recently and that database looks ducking magic

Now datafy and nav will give rise to generalised browsers of anything Clojure can touch, conceptually it's kind of like my file system, my SQL browser, my web browser, my profilers, my debuggers and any number of other things I haven't imagined, all merged into one

View on HN

My thoughts exactly!

I’ve only been playing with Clojure for a few months, but it feels like a spaceship. This addition just adds to the mystique.

My first thought upon seeing the REBL browser in action was that it looks like those protocols enable something like Smalltalk’s amazing integrated full-system dev environment—the most intriguing aspect of that language to me by far—to the Clojure world, without having to buy into the “system as image” paradigm that Smalltalk seems to require. Can anyone with Smalltalk experience comment on how accurate this hunch is? It just screams “best of both worlds” to this noob.

EDIT: I should have read the other comments first: it looks like this is a common sentiment, which is very encouraging. I’d still like to hear the first impressions of a Smalltalk veteran.

i tried installing clojure using leiningen at work and was greeted with over a hundred lines of incomprehensible java stack traces. that doesn't feel futuristic to me.

If it had todo with clojars’ URL resolving to localhost, I had the same issue trying to install recently. No obviously cause, nor a solution besides using sudo to install AFAICT. But yeah, not a good introduction to the language.

Clojure 1.10 (being released very soon) has a lot of work to make the commonly cited stacktrace problems better FWIW.

Clojure specs take me 10x longer to write than any strongly typed structure I ever made in Haskell. Not a fan, but I use it anyway with great distaste.

The funny thing is most of this has been available to Lisp programmers since the 80s.

Probably with BBN Lisp (later called Interlisp) in the end 60s.

I don't think that's true. Where did the old Lisps implement something like Datomic or Spec? Where did the old Lisps focus on immutability and composition? They didn't, they were generally imperative, even though they had "functions". Even Scheme is much more mutable than Clojure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com