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Comment by TheSmoke | Hacker News Reader

why wouldn't you ever use it at work?

Because it's rare to find companies using it. I'd love to write clojure, but everyone wants me to write ruby or javascript.

It's kinda funny how that worked out.. First, companies demanded employees write in C++, until employees demanded that companies start letting them use Java. Then, companies demanded that employees use Java, until employees demanded that companies start allowing them to use Ruby on Rails. Now companies demand that we use Ruby on Rails. All because we told them to.

That just means that the growth in clojure jobs should be here in just a few more years, right?

This presumes Clojure will be accepted by the mainstream.

Anything's possible, but Lisp has difficulty here.

I don't think the paradigm shifts happened because of programmer demand. Java's dominance came about because JEE (and J2EE) and application servers happened along at the very moment that the burgeoning internet and better browsers were driving architectural change. Firstest with mostest. Really, has anyone written a serious application server in C++? Add in massive enterprise support from IBM, Sun, and Oracle, and you get a winner.

Ruby on Rails was the spearhead of the whole convention-over-configuration paradigm, and getting back to simple, less expensive tools that stay out of the way. It's still not market-dominant if you get out of the startup bubble, nor are any of its followers. Java has ruled for over a decade.

> Really, has anyone written a serious application server in C++?

Lots of them.

Before J2EE, there was a world of C++ with CORBA.

Okay, how about a serious C++ application server written in the 21st century? CORBA? Really?

Why not just hand-roll on raw sockets like a REAL programmer?

What about a hipster NoSQL DB called MongoDB?

MongoDB isn't an application server. It's a database engine.

It is an application that makes use of a database engine, exposing data access services, either locally or via the network as a server.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but to me, an application server is something that you write programs for in a general-purpose programming language - that's how databases (where code is written in sql or something similar) don't qualify. Programs that run within application servers are written in langauges like Java and C#.

To my knowledge, there are no app servers designed to run code written in C++. Certainly, none that are mainstream.

Is IIS mainstream enough then?

http://www.iis.net/learn/develop/runtime-extensibility/devel...

I had successfully forgotten about CORBA. Ah, the golden days.

Funny thing about the way the company I worked for at the time picked up CORBA. One of our leads left for another company, was there about 7-8 months, couldn't stand it, and came back to us. But during that time he'd picked up CORBA at the other place and then imposed it on us.

That's what happens when you hire people back!

We had a project mixing C++ CORBA servers with Perl ones, running on HP-UX. Not funny to debug.

I remember, not that many years ago, when all the website jobs wanted you to use perl, and finding a job using ruby was beyond rare.

Really? I've gotten my fair share of recruiter emails looking for Clojure work. I introduced Clojure into my last job quite easily as well. If you're doing anything Java or JavaScript related, I've found it's pretty easy to get Clojure in the door once people see what you can do with it.

Interesting - where do you see these recruiter emails coming from, geography-wise? I watch, say indeed.com, and see Clojure mentioned mostly as "nice to have" mainly for what, on the surface, appear to be standard, enterprise Java jobs.

Here at Clojure/West (350 attendees), almost every company is hiring and looking for Clojure developers.

How many of those are typical medium to large size corporations?

It's a mix. For example, Staples Innovation Lab is trying to scale rapidly and hire as many as 300 people this year (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmHTFo2Rf2w). Walmart Labs is here. Climate Corporation is here (recently bought by Monsanto). And lots of others as well, certainly including many small shops or consulting companies.

Because on my work I can only use languages that the whole team is comfortable with.

Additionally the project technology stack tends to be specified by the customers.

So I will only be able to use something like Clojure when:

- Everyone on the team knows it

- The customer asked for it

So is the life at the big boring world of enterprise consulting.

There's a really informative presentation from Jay Fields who successfully introduced Clojure to his company: http://yow.eventer.com/yow-2013-1080/lessons-learned-from-ad...

Thanks for the link. I enjoy such type of presentations.

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