Comment by slifin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slifin | Hacker News Reader

Looking back Clojure has been the best thing to happen to me in this industry

I doubled my salary using it and changed industries to much more stable industries

I've been to a lot of conferences and meet ups in my career but the feeling of joy and inclusivity at Heart of Clojure was unreal

The community is still alive and well, my favourite passionate sub culture in the Clojure community at the moment is the Jank community, building a Clojure Dialect for low level work an incredible amount of work but they're doing it anyway

The problem is businesses aren't really interested in stability integrity or joy when it comes to their languages they want to commodify their developers by forcing them to write the most popular and replaceable languages possible

Then they're surprised when the quality of developers they're able to hire drops and the quality of their software drops it's all just a race to the bottom - emboldening companies to try and replace developers with AI and destroy their own companies in the process

What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL, all they see is restrictions and unfamiliarity I don't know how these people got hired without a passion for the language - lots of them get promoted to run Clojure codebases

> What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL

Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering the first "real" reason I had for moving wholesale to Clojure was a shorter feedback loop. If that's not one of your goals when moving to Clojure, I'm not sure what you're up to really.

Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.

Sure, so once a week or so you need to restart the process if you end up like that.

What I've seen people do, is restart the process after each change like you typically do in other languages, rather than evaluating the current form...

The thing that happens to me is that I'll get something working in the REPL, then try to deploy it and it breaks—because unbeknownst to me, I had gotten my REPL into some state where everything was working, but a cold start doesn't look the same.

Is this a skill issue? Absolutely. Do I still restart the REPL frequently (not after every def, but often) just to make sure I'm working with the same environment my program will be experiencing at run time? Yes I absolutely do.

Couldn't you have one test that requires your -main and runs it?

Just fire that off every now and then?

Basically the same thing, but you don't lose repl state

Ah yeah, been there, and probably the first time was when renaming a function but missing to update callers, so callers keep calling the old function, and you have no idea why the changes you made in the new function aren't working.

I have a this little function for clearing the current namespace that I call every time I rename any var inside a namespace:

  (defn clear-ns []
    (map #(ns-unmap *ns* %) (keys (ns-interns *ns*))))

Not a perfect solution, but personally I also don't know a better solution that doesn't involve loosing out on other (non-negotiable for me) benefits.

Once a week?! Aren't you killing the repl at least to run a full test suite without any stale leftover developer state before deploying?

Full test suites I run before committing essentially, in a separate tab altogether, then the full suite is typically also run in CI before any deploys.

> Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.

vars and functions too. It's the biggest issue: the inevitable mismatch after a while.

As soon as I've got any doubt there might be a stable cache or a mismatch, I'll just "nuke the current CIDER buffers and relaunch cider-jack-in-clj&cljs". And it takes 1.3 seconds.

I'll also regularly spawn, from a terminal next to my Emacs, all the unit tests related to what I'm working on, in its own JVM / process(es). I'm not talking about running tests on commit (which I can do too). I'm not talking about running tests when I modify a function.

I was there 3000 years ago when Java 1.1 was using green threads on Linux and using Java on Linux required a serious leap of faith (but I knew... I knew it'd take the world... And I knew great things like Clojure would then come).

Now a JVM starts and exits in 40 ms.

Emacs starts and exit, with 4 000 lines of elisp customization I created over the years, in 1.1s.

I cider-jack-in-clj&cljs spawning both a CLJ and a CLJS REPL in 1.3s.

Clojure devs definitely should modify vars and redefine functions at runtime and use the REPL etc.

But there's no need to let a REPL live for one week like GP is suggesting. I can launch my entire app, including Emacs and two REPLs, in 2.5s. While at the same time having all my unit tests being launched in another process.

At 2.5s to "restart the world", there's no reason not to do it more than once a week.

P.S: also stale caches are a thing in this world. It's sad but it's simply how it is. How it's always been. Restarting the whole world, while in dev, helps also deal with a great many stale caches issues that may not be related to Clojure but to other things (e.g. I didn't invent the "disable cache" button in browsers' developer tools and there's a reason it's there).

I'm probably not the sort of person you're referring to, but I do regularly restart the REPL because

1. multimethods, if you change the dispatch fn you can't get it just with a recompile, there are tools to help with this but i'm not yet in the hang of using them after several years. (Many people don't hit this because they don't use multimethods. I love multimethods for the use cases I've hit so far with clojure.)

2. interceptors (pedestal) - I love this pattern and lib, and they've made moves toward improving repl friendliness, but I find I need to recompile two NSes typically to get a true reload even in dev mode (the one where my routes are defined and the one where a particular interceptor chain is defined). sometimes i lose track of what i've reloaded, and I dont know if a bug is "real" or just an artifact of forgetting to recompile - "f it, just restart the repl"

Been over a decade since I used Clojure in anger, but at the time it really seemed like IDEs made it hard to use a REPL with a large codebase -- they seemed more to want it to be like a javac/maven stack. I assume that got better?

Guess you could say it helped you find some clojure

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