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Comment by simongray | Hacker News Reader

> how on earth am I going to convince my corpo overlords that this language belongs anywhere near a production system?

This is part of the rationale behind Clojure, being able to lean on established platforms (Java and later JS): https://clojure.org/about/rationale

With that said, though, that parsing function doesn't seem all that complicated?

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Except we just brought the JVM onboard, with its own headaches. The JVM is arguably as much of an obstacle to developing solutions as boilerplate in Java. You end up having to debug obscure JVM errors in production instead of sticking to Clojure. It’s also not doing any of the compiler tricks CL and schemes are noted for.

There is no silver bullet. Clojure is a great set of trade-offs.

What obscure JVM errors do you talk about? I’ve never ever had a JVM bug and while I don’t have decades of experience, I didn’t start today either. The JVM is hands down the easiest to debug platform, where you can connect to a prod instance remotely and see basically everything. Clojure does have a few not too readable errors, but I think that’s on Clojure’s semantics, has nothing to do with the JVM.

The idea that “a month” has a constant number of seconds (edit: exactly 1/12th of a year) seems peculiar, so I’d argue the function needs to be more complicated.

It's using a standard-year/month/day convention which might be what's required in that particular case. It's definitely not a generic solution.

The point is that it's wrong.

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