Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragandj | Hacker News Reader

I find this hard to believe.

I believe you that you haven't see much about Clojure over past 2 years of so. But the cause might be that you simply haven't looked at Clojure in the past 2 years of so. OTOH, I've seen plenty of Clojure in the same 2 years. Perhaps most of news/fuzz is about Rust, but I haven't seen much of that, since I'm not following the news sources that talk about that.

In the end, it depends what you want to do. If you want a great programming language with vast ecosystem and decent number of job opportunities, Clojure is still the thing. If you wish to participate in the most mainstream thing, I believe the Python/Java/Javascript is the answer. But then you're competing with 30 million of other job seekers there.

Perhaps Clojure can't rival the Cardashians or Lady Gagas of this world in the amount of news (for better or worse).

View on HN

Clojure has probably had its heyday, but it's quite far from dead.

The main issue is that there are other JVM languages nowadays that don't suck--that wasn't the case back in 2009. So, if you wanted the Java ecosystem but didn't want Java, your choices were quite limited. You had Scala (just ... no) and Groovy (oh, hell, no) and ... Clojure.

Since then, Java, itself, has gotten a lot better, and there have become a plethora of JVM languages since. In addition, a lot of languages now have "package managers" like lein. They have also adopted "default const-ness". So, a lot of the issue is that things that were unique to Clojure are no longer that unique in this generation of new languages. Finally, the JVM ecosystem doesn't have the same enterprise pull that it did 10 years ago ... enterprise installations back then only had the JVM, while now you can generally count on a version of Python also being installed.

Computer language adoption is slow in spite of what everybody thinks. Pick a language that you can use as a tool for the future, and don't worry too much as long as it isn't actively un-popular. You'll have to learn a new computer language about once every 15 years anyway.

Thing is that Clojure is a very different language from Java in pretty much every way. People who use Clojure are typically drawn to it because it's a Lisp and facilitates interactive development. I highly doubt that it's popularity is significantly affected by languages like Kotlin that try to be a better Java.

If you're looking for a Lisp that you can use in production then Clojure is your best bet. This is the selling point of Clojure, and why it's unlikely to be displaced by newer JVM languages from its niche.

Clojure being a lisp on the JVM is was what first drew me to try it out. Clojure being immutable-first, data-oriented, and having a core library based largely on the seq abstraction was what hooked me.

The lisp REPL benefits are wonderful, and I miss them all the time in other languages, but I also miss the overall design philosophy equally as much. Value-based data structures with atomic updates where necessary is something that ought to be the default for our industry. Give it another 40 years to settle, I guess.

Yup, once you come to appreciate the elegance of Clojure, most other languages start feeling very clunky. Completely agree that defaulting to immutability was an excellent decision.

I also find that having everything operate on a common set of data structures makes it very easy to build data processing pipelines. If I use a library, I just have to know what data it takes as an input and what it produces as its output. The data is transparent and inert. I don't need to know anything about the internals of the library worry about any special behaviors.

On the other hand, if I'm working with OO based language, then library APIs are object graphs, and objects are opaque and volatile. I now have to worry about the behaviors of each individual object in the graph, and their state.

Which JVM languages?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com