Comment by DigitalJack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DigitalJack | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a big fan of Clojure, but I don't think I'd ever write an article like this. I guess I must not be an evangelist at heart...I will tell people that I like something, but I never tell them that they must use it.

You know yourself far better than I know you, and so why would I presume to tell you how to live your life?

Functional programming is sometimes great. Most forms of programming are sometimes great. But I don't think there is one form that is great all the time. Maybe there is, and maybe if I come across it I'll be smart enough to recognize it... but in the mean time, I'll just try to use what makes sense to me.

And sometimes, functional programming just doesn't make sense to me. I still can't quite get my head around monads. They have just one or two too many levels of abstraction for me to hold in my head. I think I'm almost there, and was trying very hard to grasp them, but then in one of the videos I was watching, the guy said this: "Monads are a solution to a problem you will never have." He said it in jest, partly because the language at hand was Javascript, but it really stuck out to me.

Clojure has what I would call "sensible" state containment via STM. And sometimes just plain storing some state is the easiest and most straight forward way to go.

I love working in Clojure because it makes it so easy to break down problems into bite sized functions. That, and the concision of the syntax suits me. I'm trying to accomplish the same thing in Java by having some classes that I treat as a namespace and load them up with static functions in that namespace. I'm sure a lot of people would spontaneously barf on their screen if they saw my code though.

Meh. I personally find articles like this useful: that's how I was turned onto all the technologies I really love right now like Linux, Emacs and Haskell. Most importantly, I was convinced to work through the learning curves for all of these--which were all easier than reputed but still took some effort--which turned out to be more than worth it.

Basically, the reader can decide for themselves. Also, each reader reads more then one blog post. So having a bunch of extreme opinions to compare (e.g. a strong case for a bunch of different languages) is more useful than a whole bunch of hedged blog posts that all repeat the same refrain: "well, all languages are basically equal and you should use what seems best".

In fact, blog posts like that are a big waste of time. (I'm looking at you, prog21.) I would much rather hear a bunch of different, reasoned opinions--especially if they contradict each other--than hearing the same boring, condescending tripe about choosing "the right tool for the right job" over and over.

Also, I think the idea that all--or even most--programming languages are somehow equal is patently absurd. Similarly, I think the oft-reused tool analogy is deeply flawed. But that's neither here not there and enough material for a blog post of its own.

Of course, that's something of a false dichotomy, although it does come up in practice. But I think posts advocating a technology are also good by themselves.

The choice of technology may be subtle, but this post only needs to present one option, which it does admirably.

    > I will tell people that I like something, but I never tell them 
    > that they must use it.

I think it's just a "dude, you've got to check this out" sorta thing. Not really a command but that special itch to just share your opinion with someone.

I gravitate towards the tools/technologies/paradigms that compel this sort of enthusiasm every time.

* Martin Odersky's (and the general community's) enthusiasm led me to pursue Scala and convinced me to take a serious stab at functional programming.

* Rich Hickey (etc.) to Clojure.

* Sandi Metz (etc.) to object-oriented design.

* DHH (etc.) to Ruby and Rails.

Vim, Coffeescript, Alfred, Postgres, tmux, Crystal Reports, Dropbox, most my entire toolchain, where I went out to eat last night -- all cajoled by the infectious enthusiasm of others inspirited by those things.

> I'm sure a lot of people would spontaneously barf on their screen if they saw my code though.

This is exactly the problem I had. My canonical "getting to know your new language" project is always writing a simple chess engine. After writing a few of the high-level constructs, my next step was to try to browse some other .clj libraries, because I was pretty certain that a lot of the tedious tasks involved in writing a chess engine had already been solved.

After reading their code, I very quickly gave up.

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