> It's not Clojure-dead
What does this mean? I thought Clojure has a dedicated, if small, user base.
What does this mean? I thought Clojure has a dedicated, if small, user base.
As a Clojure/Script developer, I could understand that Clojure looks dead from the outside if you're a JS developer, you're used to new language features being shoehorned into the language every year.
But for someone inside the Clojure ecosystem who used to be a JS developer, it's a breath of fresh air when I can take a 4 year old library and include it, everything works and no bugs are to be found. If there is a bug, I can patch it from the outside, if I really have to.
Clojure in general lends itself very well to be extended from the outside (like what clojure.spec is currently doing [and many others]) so the core language doesn't really have to change anymore, we're just building libraries on top of the language which extends the language.
I'm a JS developer and I admire the way Clojure has seemed to skip both the hype and disillusionment phases and jump straight to the productivity plateau.
In the end, we will never know the "real" numbers, and developers like me who use Clojure and find themselves most productive in it, could not care less either.
Because of it's dynamic nature, there is no plateau in Clojure (lisps in general), the responsibility just shifted to outside the core language that Rich Hickey et al maintains.
Oh, no, as a developer who dealt with web front-ends for a long time, I can attest - it is totally justified.
Modern Javascript, in just a matter of a few years from being a small, simple language with a few quirks has blown into this colossal monstrosity. ECMAScript specification today is almost as big as Java's. There are tons of things that were added ( and still being added ) without careful thinking and upfront design. And that not to mention things that break all the time in the ecosystem of any JS framework. Have you ever tried updating dependencies in a nodejs project that is just a few months old? It rarely is simple and straightforward. Things break left and right. It feels there's no stability at all, compared to Clojure(script) projects. You can pretty much pick any Clojure project (that is a few years old) and update its dependencies, and most of the time, you can expect things not to break.
People got excited about React hooks, and Clojurescript people were like: "folks, we've had a better way of dealing with stateful components for a few years now."
JS devs got excited about destructuring (which looks like a weak attempt to borrow it from Clojure), without even slightest hint of how much more straightforward and cooler destructuring actually looks and works in Clojure.
They say they love JSX, which, compared to Clojure's Hiccup, is just a total and absolute crap.
JS devs are eager to use nulish coalescing and optional chaining and write unreadable crap like: `input ?? obj?.key ? 'yes' : 'no'``. And they dare to say that Lisps are not readable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly, after years of dealing with it, my take on it is this: Javascript is a morally outdated programming language. And Typescript is somewhat not the best attempt to fix its issues.
It doesn't serve anybody's interests: for all of us, nearly everything we are passionate about in software will be declared "dead" even one day, with this logic. I usually interpret someone saying "X is dead" as saying more about the person expressing it than the language or software they are talking about.