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Comment by MathMonkeyMan | Hacker News Reader

I hardly wrote any Clojure, but the only thing that bugged me was the startup time of the repl. It's been talked about enough. Yes, that problem goes away if I use a proper setup with a language server or whatever, and yes it doesn't matter for "situated" production applications, but it still peeved me.

What do I care if it's in the JVM? Sure, a JVM instance uses a lot of memory to help the garbage collector, but that doesn't bother me. JVM is just an old, mature ecosystem. Every runtime we work with (browser, nodejs, CPython, your decades of hand-written C++, the Go standard library) shares design tradeoffs with the JVM. Nothing inherently off-putting about it.

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I haven’t touched JVM in ages, but there are two things off putting about it.

First it’s viscerally slow. They have a state of the art GC, amazing benchmarks, tons of work going into performance, but it still feels slow and laggy when you develop on it. None of the other ecosystems you mentioned have that problem (including Python).

Second, they have a bad sense of design. The class library comes from a culture of needing three classes to open a file, and that culture permeated through the entire ecosystem. Almost all the software in it feels bloated and over engineered. The modal JVM experience is spending 95% of your time dealing with “enterprise-y” boilerplate that turns out to have nothing to do with the enterprise and everything to do with bad design decisions and the culture downstream from those. C++ has its own flavor of this problem, but certainly not Python or Go.

I couldn't agree more. I'm not very knowledgeable on Java, but was blown away every time I looked to see the crazy amount of boilerplate to do anything. There are all these design patterns that seem to only exist because the language is so terrible. Thousands of people who aren't professional developers write millions of lines of Python each year (just a guess, but sounds right) and the vast majority just write code and don't need 50 classes in their application to do something.

You're talking about something different - Java the language is a bit ugly, but this is about JVM performance (ie, the runtime virtual machine that is installed to execute Java programs) with Clojure, where there is not much boilerplate to speak of.

Although the JVM is one of the sleekest environments around though and I'm confused by the fellow saying it is "viscerally slow". Clojure loads slowly, but after that everything happens at speed.

Clojure itself actually loads pretty quickly, but almost every project has enough libraries to make loading the project take a few seconds.

I'm aware they're different and apologize for getting off topic. It wasn't my intent.

> First it’s viscerally slow. They have a state of the art GC, amazing benchmarks, tons of work going into performance, but it still feels slow and laggy when you develop on it. None of the other ecosystems you mentioned have that problem (including Python).

I really can't relate to this. What part of the process is noticeably slower than Python? I have a lot of Python projects and couldn't say any of them are slower than JVM apps.

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