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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

I'm an experienced developer and I'm getting the feeling that advanced languages are getting less relevant for most applications, since you usually just need a little glue code to glue together mainstream solutions or managed services. I don't need the power of Clojure to connect SQS to Lambda with some extra custom logic.

But Clojure does look amazing :)

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For me it's mostly a quality of life issue. I find Clojure workflow is far more pleasant than most languages because it's interactive, and I like Clojure as a language because it's small and focused. I find the main feature of Clojure lies in its simplicity as opposed to advanced features. Clojure code tends to be very direct where you're just passing data through a series of transformations, and you apply a few common patterns to solve a wide range of problems.

I can see why Clojure is seen that way ("advanced", "powerful"), but a big piece of it’s design is Rich Hickey’s view that "we can make the same software we're making today with dramatically simpler stuff."

Learning Clojure has made working in other languages much harder for me - pretty much all of my Clojure programming is functions plus transforming data structures (mostly maps). So few concepts to keep in your head!

The majority of my work is in TypeScript these days, and I always write the most Clojure-y TypeScript I can manage.

Why not use ClojureScript and transpile it to TypeScript/JavaScript? That's part of my point. It's usually not worth it.

Yeah, I can see that. Not disagreeing really.

I found ClojureScript worth it a few years ago. I’ve written two frontend apps (desktop-style interactive single-page applications meant for longer sessions) of reasonable size in ClojureScript. There’s a lot of non-glue code there (in fact mostly non-glue code, given the interactivity and statefulness of the applications).

Very little language and library churn has made maintaining them very straightforward really, and I won’t be rewriting them any time soon. Being able to use DataScript nearly made the choice worth it on it’s own!

The reason I’m mostly using TypeScript these days (for new things & backend code) is that it’s just too helpful for typing the data structures and reducing the "how many things do I have to keep in my head" burden. My TypeScript (like my ClojureScript) is mostly just functions and data structures (avoiding classes, inheritance, etc), and I avoid using any of the more complicated TypeScript features as much as possible.

It’s kind of heretical, but if Clojure had a well-adopted gradual structural type system (essentially what TypeScript has done for JavaScript) then I would find it hard to not pick Clojure for most things.

When I was looking into ClojureScript I was kind of concerned at the complexity of writing applications in ReFrame which seems to be what most of the community is using. I've developed apps in this kind of event-emitting/event handler style before in JavaScript and found it quickly got quite out of hand. For my next app I will want to go with something like React-Query that in a sort of declarative way handles all your data fetching for you, and lets you decouple your components from the getting ahold of the data they depend on. I also searched far and wide for some kind of framework/library that supports SSR+CSR like Next.js but I don't think there's anything ready yet except maybe https://github.com/pitch-io/uix.

Interesting point. I've recently taken on a client who insists on using C# with their cloud solution. It's killing me. Though you're calling Clojure "advanced", what I'm missing is its simplicity.

Maybe a better classification would be "amazing languages" vs "good enough ubiquitous languages" :)

But you need to write the Lambda function itself in some programming language. The type of "glue" is less relevant than in the past, sure, but the thing being glued needs to be written as well, and that's often critical business logic.

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