Feels like Elixir has stolen much of Clojure's appeal and 'thunder' as the niche pragmatic functional language.
I've been to Elixir conferences, and they felt like people were just encouraging each other to build solid software WITH each other. I've not seen this level of camaraderie for other programming language communities.
Elixir devs — and I am super biased here — are a special bunch :)
Sure, we have Luminus in the Clojureverse but its just not as easy and straightforward as the Rails-like experience of Phoenix. You don't have Hickey personally responding to comments on HN/Reddit etc.
The Clojurescript community is friendlier, IMO.
Defn: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/defn/
The REPL: https://www.therepl.net/episodes/ (Seems to have gone quiet)
ClojureScript Podcast: https://clojurescriptpodcast.com/
Functional Design in Clojure: https://clojuredesign.club/ (Also seems to have gone quiet since December)
LispCast by Eric Normand: https://lispcast.com/
Cognitect, the company behind Clojure also has their own podcast but I haven't found it to be that interesting most of the time, at least yet: https://www.cognitect.com/cognicast/index.html
Not specifically Clojure-related but has discussed a few times including wit Rich Hickey (as well as other unrelated great conversations!): CaSe https://www.case-podcast.org/
Completely not at all about Clojure but great software podcasts:
Go Time: Even though I hardly ever write Go, I find their conversations to be really great and having lessons beyond Go. It helps that I am interested in the language though: https://changelog.com/gotime
Web Development and Development in general - The Bike Shed: https://www.bikeshed.fm/
Software Engineering Radio: https://www.se-radio.net/
CoRecursive: https://corecursive.com/
Inside Java: https://inside.java/
I’ve listened to some Defn with mixed results. I really liked their interview with Daniel Higginbotham, especially when they argued a bit about what “simple” means.
Even if some of the others have gone quiet, there plenty of backlog to choose interesting episodes from. The Bike Shed also looks right up my alley. They probably should have had some more discussion before choosing that name, though.
That said, now I've dug in and really used it for solving some problems I am finding it an elegant and enjoyable experience.
I'd happily use either although I think Elixir has a particular fit to web applications.
Although Microsoft has made it from Microsoft Research into official Visual Studio, it has been mostly an up hill fight to keep it there, while .NET languages group mostly cares about C# and VB, and to certain extent C++/CLI for integration with Windows APIs.
F# when taken into account by management, comes always after those three.
Most of the Visual Studio tooling for C# and VB isn't available to F# projects, you are supposed to do it manually, e.g. GUI designers, EF database to code generation, .NET 5 code generators.
It's not readily apparent from the ruby like syntax though.
require 'ripper'
Ripper.sexp('a && b')
=> [:program, [[:binary, [:vcall, [:@ident, "a", [1, 0]]], :"&&", [:vcall, [:@ident, "b", [1, 5]]]]]]
Ripper.sexp(<<-RB)
if a
b
else
c
end
RB
=> [:program, [[:if, [:vcall, [:@ident, "a", [1, 5]]], [[:vcall, [:@ident, "b", [2, 4]]]], [:else, [[:vcall, [:@ident, "c", [4, 4]]]]]]]]
I love Ruby, Elixir, and Lisp(s)
One striking similarly Elixir has to lisp style languages is the macro system. You have quoted and unquoted expressions just like lisp.
And like lisp most of Elixir, down to the low level stuff like if statements, modules, and so on, is built up from a few primitives.
Here are the primitives that the Elixir language is built from: