Comment by newcrobuzon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newcrobuzon | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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