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Comment by lucian1900 | Hacker News Reader

lucian1900

There are many Java pains, both little and big. Most of them are more related to the JVM than the language.

It's why I still don't use Clojure significantly (or even ClojureScript), even though I really like the language. Things just break or simply never work and it appears random. Other environments I use get a lot less wrong (although node is pretty bad too).

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That is true. Coming from Ruby world, you find that Java and the Clojure world have a lot of rough edges. But Clojure makes things as easy as possible. For example, reading from a file or a URL is still (slurp "https://"). It works fine on a stock OSX, Java 8 sdk and the latest clojure. Don't let such minor inconveniences discourage you from exploring Clojure/ClojureScript. The language is fascinating. I feel that learning and practicing clojure has made me a better developer.

Actually, Clojure improves the "Java experience" by quite a bit. As an example, leiningen as a build tool is quite usable, and it doesn't take much work to get a working (yes, also from the command line) application.

As for the JVM "just breaking", I can't agree with that. The JVM is an impressive piece of engineering and I'm very glad I can make use of it in Clojure, rather than deal with half-baked attempts at building yet another VM (reference counting, anyone?).

Interestingly, Leiningen is very much usable as a Maven replacement even for pure Java projects. I've tried it, it works fine. Just specify :java-source-paths in project.clj, and you get all the goodies like lein uberjar for free.

What's wrong with node? npm is a very polished package manager, and I'm frankly surprised how infrequently libraries with native bindings fail to build.

For as great as npm is it also has plenty of issues. `npm clear cache` is so common that I don't know why it even bothers with a cache.

I have always had the feeling that JVM is very stable, but I don't have much Java experience. Is that a wrong assumption?

Stable != Convenient to develop with.

Right, of course. Been working a lot with the Swift compiler so I was in some state of mind where I associated interpreter/compiler pain with faults and crashes :)

What pains come from the JVM? From my viewpoint the JVM is the best thing to come from the Java ecosystem.

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