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Comment by puredanger | Hacker News Reader

Re "core.async is macro sugar on top of java.util.concurrent" - yes, but also no. Java does not (yet) have a way to spin light-weight processes that can park without consuming a thread OR a way to select/alt over multiple parked ops, so being able to do that in Clojure is actually novel (and enabled by having macros that can rewrite code as a state machine).

There have been a few projects that did this in the past on Java using runtime bytecode modification but none of them are widely used afaik.

This will change once Project Loom lands in Java and provides m:n fibers.

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Yes, yes in the future at some undefined point java will be better.

Meanwhile go works very well today. And you don't need to be saddled with the JVM and the very bloated java ecosystem.

>very bloated java ecosystem

Why waste time reinventing what java has already solved?

Life is too short to waste on Java? Yes, some of us really find Java that bad.

Plenty of other languages have solved the same problems in much better ways (as demonstrated by this very discussion re: asynchronicity). I'll pick Go over Java, Erlang over Go and wouldn't pick Java (incl languages running on top of) for anything today.

Why not?

The java ecosystem has solved so many problems already.

Don’t you want to just focus on the business problems?

I don't solve business problems, I solve my own problems and try to have fun along the way.

The business problem still can include things like "concurrency", which is just -painful- in Java, especially if I/O bound.

I much prefer languages that make easy stuff harder, but hard stuff easier, than languages like Java that make easy stuff easier, and hard stuff harder.

Java doesnt solve business problems.

It solves enterprise ones.

Or at least claims to.

Enterprises do business last time I checked.

The Java ecosystem has solved many business problems, for me and plenty of other people I personally know, both in small startups and in large companies. Just because you are personally prejudiced against Java for some reason, doesn't mean that its not a good ecosystem, because it is. I don't like Java the language (and certainly not the crazy frameworks), although it has improved, but the ecosystem, especially from Clojure, is fantastic.

I usually find immutability to be more important than this particular detail. Because of this my preference is usually Elixir/Erlang, followed closely by Clojure (for the potential interop with a huge ecosystem), with languages like Go and Java fairly close to eachother but pretty far down list.

I would love it if Clojure on BEAM were more mainstream.

https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl ?

You are confusing Java with the JVM.

No I'm not, there is no escaping Java when you work with Clojure, since you'll be using Java libraries and working with Java APIs all the time.

Depends on what you're doing.

Sure, sometimes a simple, crude runtime will do, but if you need really good performance and low-overhead deep observability, you might want to be saddled with something that's more state-of-the-art.

Regarding Java, sure. But in the context of Clojure, it's here right now as well, no need to wait for anything.

I also don't really understand the "bloat" comment. What do you refer too? Are you referring to the fact the JVM supports too many features?

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