Hacker News Reader

Comment by lgrapenthin | Hacker News Reader

1) There are enough templates and starter packs with documentation. Frameworks have been tried, but they quickly turn out to limit your Clojure given powers.

2) Thats true, but its not leaky abstraction. Clojure never claims to abstract the host away, it embraces it so you can do all low level Java/JS stuff and seemlessly use their libraries without FFIs.

3) You have all Java/JS libs. Most Clojure libs are simply "done", so they get no commits. I don't know of any unmaintend ones.

4) Java is improving? Clojure is mostly done with that already. It was designed long after Java and makes many improvements obsolete.

View on HN

I think this response is a good illustration of the frustration that I (and I suspect many others) have with Clojure. I’m speaking as someone who’s been excited by it since around 2012, has helped run Clojure meetups, and has tried many times to advocate for its usage.

I really _really_ want to love Clojure but the first three points (unfortunately along with the Lisp syntax simply because it’s different enough) alienate too many people from the language and it seems like that’s something that Clojure has at best accepted as not the target audience and at worst is still unwilling to acknowledge.

In my experience the Clojure community is pretty tone-deaf when it comes to critisim. The usual response being something along the lines of 'your problem is not a problem, it was meant that way'.

> In my experience the Clojure community is pretty tone-deaf when it comes to critisim.

Its quite frustrating actually. The people who are likely to be greatest advocates of the language (its a new-age Lisp!) are likely to be vocal about its failings, and are also hit with worst reactions like being told their issues are not issues.

If you are already part of the team, Clojure folks are very friendly. I want to avoid saying cult, but sometimes it has characteristics of one.

My theory is that some people get really attached to the language and take criticism to it personal. See the comment above where someone says 'I feel compelled to defend the honor of my favorite language'. It does get cult-like at times, which is too bad as adressing the failings instead of ignoring them would improve the language and increase adoption.

The answer is more like "your problem is a feature, you just don't see it yet". Many things are very different in Clojure and can quickly lead to misjudgement like " leaky abstraction" instead of "seamlessly integrated host interop"

If being a hosted language alienates people from the language (item 2) they just don’t like the language. It was born as a hosted language and really isn’t clojure without host interop. It’s core to how Clojure is viable in the first place, core to its performance, core to its ability to have libraries. (It also seems to be taking into some really interesting places - from Java and .Net to JS and now Dart.)

Failing to write a native runtime from scratch and unearth one of the founding bedrocks of the language doesn’t mean Clojure is hostile to input or trying to alienate anyone, it’s just a massive project that no one is currently interested in (for good reason IMO).

What can be done to address point 3? Push monthly "project still active" commits that bump some minor version number on the docs?

Clojure has an OS/2 problem in that one of the biggest selling points is Java compatibility. But, clojure is different enough from Java, and that difference is actually another one of biggest selling points, that using Java libs from Clojure is not idiomatic (IMO) and uncomfortable as wrapping/calling Java libs increases through codebase. But, because Java libs already exist and are maintained, there is little incentive to actually implement and improve Clojure libs themselves. The bootstrap became its noose.

Using Java from Clojure is totally idiomatic. Its very easy to abstract away the ugly interop in one place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com