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Comment by ekzy | Hacker News Reader

Call it “stalled” if you like, it’s stable and it’s pure joy. I can just get stuff done with Clojure. And things that may seem inactive, like that lib that you need that hasn’t had a commit in 8 years, turns out that it just works and doesn’t need to change. This is commonplace in Clojure.

Spec is still alpha and I’m not sure it will evolve more or if it’ll be something completely different. At least they’re not pushing you down the wrong path. Use/look at Malli instead of spec.

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There are things in the core language that are still kind of bullshit. The thing that gives me the most headaches is how annoying it is to use Java libraries that have the lambda syntax.

You can't just pass in a Clojure `fn` into a Java lambda function. You have to `reify` the interface and implement the single method. It's annoying and verbose and frustratingly the equivalent code is considerably cleaner in Java as a result.

I know that this is a product of how Java implemented lambdas by having interfaces with a single method, and I'm not saying that it would be trivial to add into Clojure, but I don't think it's impossible and I think people have been complaining about this for more than a decade now.

So while I love Clojure, it's probably my favorite language, I do get a little annoyed when people act like it's "stable" because there's nothing to fix.

I think that particular issue was addressed in the recent Clojure release [https://clojure.org/news/2024/09/05/clojure-1-12-0] ("Clojure developers can now invoke Java methods taking functional interfaces by passing functions with matching arity.")

Looks like you're right! I stand corrected, it's admittedly been a few months since I've touched Clojure.

You were not wrong though, Java 8 was released in 2014, so it only took them ~10 years ;)

Yeah, and most of my professional Clojure experience was from 2018 to 2021, and a few personal projects in 2022 and 2023, and that lack of support for the functional APIs really annoyed me; I was writing a Kafka Streams application, which uses lots of lambdas, and it annoyed me enough to rewrite it with vanilla Java.

I'm sure it's a difficult thing to implement, so I'm a little forgiving, but considering that Java interop is one of the biggest selling points for Clojure I do think it's fair to criticize a bad experience with it.

I need to play with the newer stuff though; the linked changes seem cool as hell.

> At least they’re not pushing you down the wrong path

No, but the release of spec single-handedly killed Schema, a more mature contract lib.

Then spec stagnated, because the core team didn't want to work on it, but as a core team library, nobody else can work on it, either.

Thus was born Malli, because people got tired of waiting.

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