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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

With Java, your convoluted mess can be parsed by IDE and you can figure out what it is doing. Also, most of it looks the same and is Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v of something else.

With Clojure the mess is still 100k to millions LOC because the guys did not know how to make worthwhile abstractions, but now it can't be parsed by IDE and you are screwed trying to figure out what happens at runtime.

ALso, if you think if there is less code then it is easier to understand, go and read any advanced Common Lisp book (like Let over Lambda) and try to really understand what some of the more advanced macros do, exactly. It is definitely not the same as reading pages upon pages of redundant code.

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This doesn't match my experience. I've had to deal with some Java code that the ide was useless to help figure out. Usually made worse by some over optimized build system that was non Google friendly to see what was supposed to happen.

Worse, the abstractions made it so that even a simple feature would require about six files. Not counting the tests.

Not to say that clojure has been a breeze. Worst I see there is developers refusing to use libraries it external programs and instead taking a ridiculous "first principals" approach. Even if they get it working, it is typically not search friendly, as everyone else is using some other tool. Basically, the same trap I see in build systems,

> I've had to deal with some Java code that the ide was useless to help figure out.

Spring annotations, maybe?

God I hate them. With annotations Java pulls off the rather unique trick of being both verbose and magical at the same time.

tbf, annotations aren't the blame. It's Spring's runtime magic with close to zero friendly figure-out-ability.

That and just over "abstracted" code that honestly feels like a strawman that someone made to argue against abstractions. :(

Millions of LOC of Clojure project is unheard of; from the article: Nubank has "2.7 million lines of Clojure code [encompassing] several hundred microservices written in Clojure" – the 2.7M is across the entire enterprise.

I have an enterprise client right now sitting on 1.5M java 1M SQL 1.5M XML for a single government system that mostly does not function at all, it just gets passed from contractor to contractor, each one sucking down a hundred million dollars before tossing the hot potato. Thanks for the money, Java!

A fintech that I am aware of chose Elixir and is a complete shitshow, they're trying to move away from it after being established with it.

Can't hire for it, can't refactor the code at scale, etc.

Be careful with what you read, newer languages are usually trying to sell themselves where established languages have happy people not trying to sell it, or, resume driven developers trying to sell it as bad.

Brex?

New languages have green field projects by its very nature feeding the hype.

> With Java, your convoluted mess can be parsed by IDE and you can figure out what it is doing.

This is not my experience whatsoever.

Can you elaborate on “Clojure can’t be parsed by IDE”? Surely some amount of static analysis is possible.

The same amount of static analysis as Python, Ruby, or any other language that doesn't have static type checking. Some people need something to happen when they press dot, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSEQfqNYNAc

Gotcha, that's kind of what I figured.

Frankly, VSCode is reasonably good at giving you something for Python, and the relative lack of static analysis is offset by other qualities of the language, so this feels like a pretty weak argument.

As I've been mostly using Python for the last 10 years I forgot how nice this dot thing can be ;). True that vscode and pycharm can give you something but I found that it's very often crap.

I am writing a little bit of C# atm and astonished how you can just dot tab through your work (without ever having read a tutorial or book on C#) and all those other contextual information you get with "full" visual studio. Somehow feels like just letting you guide through the work :).

On the other hand, the students I teach really struggle when they don't have all their IDE tricks. They learn almost exclusively C# at their institution in the first year(s) while my experience is mostly playing with Unity ;).

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