Clojure Core
blog.fogus.me
blog.fogus.me
- I'd love to know if this was enabled by Nubank's purchase of Cognitect. It's none of my business; I'm just curious.
- As an enjoyer of the history of programming languages, I'm always going to be glad when anyone who has read their lisp joins the Clojure team. I bought Kogge off fogus's (and Stanislav's) recommendation. http://blog.fogus.me/2012/07/25/some-lisp-books-and-then-som...
Will insideclojure remain a sort-of personal blog of Alex, or will it be an unofficial dev blog of core?
I'm curious if there is a particular larger project that is using clojure that's driving a lot of this?
Or particular JVM application like Kafka?
The days when Clojure was just "a toy to impress your friends" are long gone. It's a mature ecosystem for the serious craft.
Today it's the most widely used FP language; it has gained popularity and doing better than OCaml, Erlang/Elixir, Elm, Haskell, F#, and even Scala.
Clojure is slowly but steadily growing. Without any support from the big players. I think the core Clojure team has fewer people than teams at Facebook and Google for front-end libraries like React and Angular. Podcasts are being recorded, books published, conferences organized.
Skeptics often criticize "not growing, small but very vocal community", they call it "a cult of Rich Hickey" and pronounce the language to be dying. The truth is - many companies realizing the incredible pragmatism of ideas behind Clojure.
It looks like despite how awesome Clojure is, there is something keeping it from achieving growth in adoption and the community should look at how to address that rather than look the other way.
Clojure is a Lisp. Lispers simply failed to convince the younger generation of programmers how powerful and versatile Lisp can be. Any Lisp dialect these days gets rather automatically rejected. Of course, Clojure (or any other Lisp dialect) currently would struggle to gain momentum and compete with other non-lispy languages.
But if you look at the stuff that Lispers are capable of incubating, you'd be amazed. Today Clojurists figuring out interop with Python, Julia and R. They've built Clojure-like PLs for other language ecosystems: Golang, Lua, Erlang, etc. They are pushing Clojurescript on microcontrollers. They're building neural networks, graph databases, and mobile apps. They're borrowing good ideas from other languages, frameworks, and tools.
This isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. Look at the bigger picture. Notice things like Idris, which uses Chez Scheme for its backend. Chez Scheme is almost 40 years old!
And within various Lisps, Clojure is undoubtedly a resounding success. If anything at this point truly could de-throne Clojure, it won't be something like Elixir. It would be a better, faster, perhaps more efficient fork of Clojure.
What's keeping it from achieving growth in adoption is not something internal to Clojure. Or something that Clojurists can turn around. It's the fact that it is a Lisp. And that's not going to change. In fact, before Clojure, Lisps seemed to be getting out of fashion. Clojure made Lisp (somewhat) popular again.
I could use SQL and Emacs Lisp as examples (of languages doing fine with no frameworks). Still, you'd probably say something like: "I meant in the context of general-purpose languages".
Python has not become popular solely because of Django, or Java because of Spring, or Javascript due to Angular, or C# because of ASP.Net. Rails leading to broader adoption of Ruby is rather an aberration than normalcy.
What is a framework but the collection of prescriptive "recipes" that are not always so easily compatible with other frameworks?
There aren't many Clojure frameworks because the Clojure ecosystem itself is a framework with many interchangeable parts. Nothing is stopping you, for example, from incorporating both, Fulcro and Re-frame in the same app. Or using Integrant, Trapperkeeper, and Mount - all in one project. But have you ever tried using both, Angular and React in the same Javascript app? It's a glorious nightmare.
Everyone is biased; people who trained to write in Rails would want to see "a framework"; those who come from Racket perhaps would wish for a better macro system, those who like static-type systems may argue that Clojure needs one, some want better error messages, some proper tail-recursion, etc.
There's no tool, library, framework, or language with no deficiencies, and Clojure is not an exemption. It just goes to personal preference, and there are many, many programmers who absolutely love building things with Clojure. I think the language has passed the threshold of "critical mass", there's way too many people and companies invested heavily in it; it's not going away anytime soon. It may not expand rapidly and gain wide adoption and that's fine. It steadily, slowly keeps growing.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/in...
Emacs Lisp comes bundled with this framework in all distributions of the GNU Emacs editor.
My employer is moving away from cljoure after 100% of the stack on clojure/clojurescript for over 10 yrs. All the companies that you mentioned ( with the exception of nubank) adopted Clojure years ago. Curious to know if there are new companies picking clojure, your comment seems to imply so.
I'd be interested in why that is if you have a moment to write a bit about it.
Your case is anecdotal, and I bet it has little to do with Clojure itself and primarily is driven by some other factors. There are tons of talks from various Clojure conferences on Youtube, where the speakers come from different startups.
https://snyk.io/blog/kotlin-overtakes-scala-and-clojure-to-b...
Realistically, it doesn't matter, Clojure will never become the most popular JVM language after Java. Still, Scala's adoption is slowing down.
I was curious about specific products/projects, seems like you may be able to answer my question. Do you know of any large product/projects in particular that are written in clojure and very popular?
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2687553/puppet-server-drop...
I find it very hard to believe that clojure is beating out F#. F# has been included in the .NET runtime. Anyone who has c# automagically has f# available to them.
Do you have a source to your claim?
edit: guess not
So what? Anyone who buys a Mac, has off the bat access to Perl and Applescript.
F# even though used in Fintech sector, failed to gain wider popularity, even within the .Net world, which is still largely driven by C#.
> Do you have a source to your claim?
- Clojure has more active podcasts than any of other FP lang: https://www.fpcasts.com - Gathers more conferences: https://purelyfunctional.tv/functional-programming-conferenc... - More books published on Clojure: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Clojure - More companies actively using https://clojure.org/community/companies - It generates jobs: https://www.google.com/search?q=functional+programming+jobs
Because the F# and C# communities are in the process of merging via .NET?
>- Clojure has more active podcasts than any of other FP lang: https://www.fpcasts.com - Gathers more conferences: https://purelyfunctional.tv/functional-programming-conferenc... - More books published on Clojure: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Clojure - More companies actively using https://clojure.org/community/companies - It generates jobs: https://www.google.com/search?q=functional+programming+jobs
None of these really prove the argument you're trying to make though?
Ignoring the C# and .NET communities when talking about F# to re-frame the argument so clojure always wins is not how any of this works.
You may like F#, OCaml, Haskell more, or you may just hate Clojure (it's okay), but that is the truth - among other languages with a strong FP emphasis, Clojure currently is the most widely used in the industry. It doesn't make it better or worse.
May I remind you though, the use of FP langs as a whole is still so small compared to Python, Javascript, Java, that it almost makes no difference, beyond the fact that FP languages are huge influencers and affect the evolution of other PLs.
https://snyk.io/blog/kotlin-overtakes-scala-and-clojure-to-b...
Add to this a lot of people are changing jobs and pushing for using more alternative languages or exploring new languages and as a result many people are building in what they want instead of what they are forced to use at work. The sibling comment about roam is a good example as they have had a lot of press lately.
https://roamresearch.com is built with Clojure(Script).
https://storm.apache.org was written in Clojure but more recently re-written in Java to encourage OS contribution
HN probably has the biggest crowd of devs that know (and like) Lisps, even if they don't use it for everyday things. Anything about Lisps gets upvoted quickly but if you look at Clojure posts here in HN, you'll see that all the comments don't really have any substance (also, look at the point to comments ratio of Clojure posts.).