Comment by nanomonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanomonkey | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see so many people complain that it's hard to hire Clojure engineers, when I've had the exact opposite problem...trying to find a Clojure shop to join. They are few and far between, and the few that are hiring say that they will take folks that are new to Clojure, but then are baffled when you don't know how to idiomatically solve whiteboard problems.

Clojure remedies all of my problems with previously used languages (Basic, C, Java, ObjC, Javascript, Python), in that it allows me to remove boilerplate and create layers of abstraction that are appropriate for problem solving. It's also a fairly opinionated language, preferring functional programming methods that work with how I like to solve problems. This is refreshing, as it feels like I can bypass all of the style wars that I encountered with Python., and the verbosity of C/Java/Obj-C. No longer being told to rewrite functional code as an object, by an engineering manager that only ever writes imperative scripts.

Lastly I now love writing front end code in Clojurescript...something I never would have expected. Reagent and Re-frame are a dream for large complex SPAs, which while I dislike in principle, seem to be the trend in cross-platform GUIs.

And it makes programming fun again!

Both devs and jobs exist but they are mismatched in terms of geography and experience expectations. I don't think it's specific to Clojure, it's common to any narrow technology. Certainly things have gotten far better over the last 10 years and there are more companies hiring in Clojure more actively now than I've ever seen. Fixing it requires a feedback cycle that takes a long time to grow into an active market.

When I first started in Java in 1997, there were few companies doing Java and few devs who knew it and it was much the same. Sun spent like a billion dollars marketing Java to create that ecosystem.

> Sun spent like a billion dollars marketing Java

I guess now the question is if Nubank could/will also promote Clojure and to what extent (or if they will support Cognitect enough to do that). I would wonder if they went through that thought process and what RoIs for that are from their perspective.

It might even take much lesser investment than equivalent of $1bil from 90s... The Java/JVM market is huge so it might need just a little nudge :)

Within the JVM ecosystems it seems that basically Kotlin (as nice as it is) has been stealing some market share that might have belonged to Clojure. And all that just by selling some cheap cut syntax sugar on the corner.

There definitely is a huge desire within Java/JVM community to innovate and if approached correctly Clojure could actually shine - there are just few misconceptions and fears that could be put to sleep by some smart marketing strategy. Nubank is great first step in that direction, because it gives an example of a mature large yet innovative company relying on Clojure in production.

> And all that just by selling some cheap cut syntax sugar on the corner.

I suppose you could dismiss a lot of what Kotlin adds as mere syntactic sugar. But it also makes some much more fundamental improvements. It provides a much cleaner, unified, object-oriented type system. It provides about as sane an approach to null safety as is possible on the JVM. (Clojure's is arguably better, but I'll concede that nil punning is not for everyone.) And it provides a clean set of core libraries that doesn't have nearly as many friction points and inconsistencies as the core JDK does.

Clojure has no null safety. You may encounter it less because of the foundational building blocks you use in the language, but NPEs are most certainly there.

Same for Kotlin, really. Can only do so much to stabilize things when you're building your home in a marecage.

There are certainly limits, but null safety doesn't need to be one of them. Typescript does a great job of handling null safety on top of JavaScript.

I don't see any technical reason why Kotlin couldn't have done the same.

I don't see any technical reason why Kotlin couldn't have done the same.

Kotlin does do the same. I totally disagree with GP's assertion that Kotlin has no null safety. I use both Kotlin and Clojure and I find Kotlin much better than either Clojure or Java with respect to NPEs.

NPEs exist but I probably go months or even years between encountering them. Most Clojure functions are polymorphic on nil and provide safe default behavior. You primarily encounter them when invoking Java APIs via interop.

Kotlin now has a new master and needs to decide how much they want to innovate on the JVM or keep the language compatible with ART capabilities and Android libraries.

KMM can only help so much, specially when all the big Java projects are all integrated into stable releases.

  > It's interesting to see so many people complain that it's hard to hire Clojure engineers, when I've had the exact opposite problem

Both can easily be true at the same time. Just because there are people looking for language X jobs, and companies looking to hire X developers, doesn't mean they are a good match. It's a bit like a liquidity problem, having more positions and more candidates in a market helps them all shuffle around to find a good "fit".

Lots of jobs in this recent job thread btw: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/k937mc/who_is_hiri...

Thanks puredanger. I'll check it out.

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