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Real World Clojure

tech.puredanger.com

81 pointsAdrock11 comments

most of those are (no criticism of post intended) as much about fp as clojure.

intellij/idea + la clojure plugin wasn't mentioned, but is also a pretty good environment (however, i am seriously annoyed that the c/c++ plugin is dead - how can a major ide ignore c?!).

and i second the problems with profiling (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7223297/please-help-me-un...) - traces don't help much at all, but you can force critical chunks of code to java-like speed with some effort.

one thing that i don't think was mentioned is that the language (+ libraries) was changing pretty quickly not so long ago. i am not sure if it's stabilised "forever", or if 1.4 was just an exception, but 1.3 to 1.4 has been less traumatic than previous releases.

also, while i'm at it, it's probably worth emphasizing the two things that clojure has that you wouldn't expect from just "java + fp". first, the lazy sequences are great. imho this buys you some of the flexibility of haskell without the "other stuff". it was always possible in other languages, of course, but clojure makes it the new normal, and it's great. second, the multithreading support (not just the lack of state, but the transactional mem stuff). in both cases, it's like "haskell for normals" :o) (and in haskell's defense, perhaps explicit types would help with some of the design / architectural issues mentioned in the article once you start using hofs).

The language should be less of a moving target now, after the changes in 1.3.

Agreed. The transition from 1.2 to 1.3 (due to libraries, contrib shattering, and language changes) was probably a man-month of effort for us. However, it appears that 1.3 to 1.4 is probably a couple hrs work in fixing a few minor things.

Neat. I wish I could find a job that used clojure. To overuse a cliche, I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be deadly. There is a ton of awesome work being done in the language and it would be fun to really learn it via hard problems.

I recently helped a friend get a Clojure job. I think there are good opportunities if you're looking.

I am still deeply embedded in undergrad for a year or so, so it's more of "that would be nice someday to do" then a "I hate programming all day long in python" type situation. I'll probably try making a real/useful project with clojure before I start looking around the market for sure though.

I lead a team of 4 at a company in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. We'll be adding more members later this year and Clojure is our primary back-end language (we also use Ruby and lots of JavaScript). We have been quite happy with it for many of the same reasons Alex mentioned.

You can make a problem harder than it looks if you want to :)

Discussion from 7 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3136914

Clojure is currently #2 on my to-learn list, after some Python tools like Pyramid and Flask. Clojure looks simply fascinating, from what I can tell.

Alex, thanks for posting stuff like this. I'm going to look through your archives as well to see what I can learn. Might just have to make a trip to St. Louis in September for Strange Loop :)

Any programming language X people crying over "Real life X" ---it's always a sad story.

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