Hacker News Reader

Comment by notduncansmith | Hacker News Reader

Is "ugliness" the main point of contention with Clojure? It's a Lisp, so sure people will love it or hate it, but I hadn't heard this criticism directed specifically at Clojure until now.

View on HN

Objective-C is in my eye an example of an 'ugly' language (syntax wise), most definitely not Clojure.

I learned it when NeXT still existed. Could never get around all those [] and using @keywords everywhere.

All that sleek looking industrial design...and then...that. :)

As someone who have tried clojure a little bit after it was launched , but after a while dropped; my personal view is that Lisps are great for small stuff, but once you need to go for something bigger, with big teams, the thing start to melt down.

And here is where OOP shines.. The probable "winners" of the languages of the next decade will be OOP ones that glue well with functional techniques and functional languages that are very good at OOP techniques.

F# is really good here, and from the OOP side C# and Java are also running for this trophy (again).

Maybe swift.. but we need to see if the adoption will have a limit, given its tied to a closed platform, and its also closed source

(But Rich Hickey is a bad ass and the framework design behind clojure is a piece of art)

> but once you need to go for something bigger, with big teams, the thing start to melt down.

The people in the Clojure community have already started exploring this issue. Component [1] [2], Jig [3], and others are trying to add just enough OOP back for the reasons you mentioned.

[1] https://github.com/stuartsierra/component

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13cmHf_kt-Q

[3] https://github.com/juxt/jig

> after it was launched

That is quite a while ago, back then it was mainly one guy who write a compiler, by kmow we have a awesome build and project tool, pretty good editor options, CSP, logic prrogramming, static typesystems, awesome validatiin librarys, a fantastic pattern match ...

In terms of organisation, I would suggest looking at the 'components' library, it takrs the good things of OOP design for things like managing services. Clojure has great namespaces also.

Well, thats my personal view. I suspect thats how lots of people feel too, given it has not seen any major adoption despite being relentlessly hyped for last couple of years[1].

Also, F# is already in top 20 with relatively little fanfare.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Github most popular languages 2014:

Rank 19. Clojure Rank 46. F#

Source https://jaxbot.me/articles/github-most-popular-languages

FWIW on that TIOBE list Delphi/Pascal is listed as more popular than F#.

There's some selection bias here. Github will promote languages that are classically open source friendly - or have a heritage in open source. Languages like Ruby, Javascript and Java will naturally feature higher in such popularity shootouts.

This may not be the case in the world of enterprise, closed-source software.

Yes, financial industry is rushing to put their F# projects on GitHub. And the size of the repository certainly doesn't matter.

It baffles me people use Github to measure anything.

Most of the enterprise projects are not even using Git!

Nor is Clojure particularly aimed at the TIOBE audience. So they're both pretty useless metrics. But it is disingenuous to say Clojure has reached a mass adoption when it's one of the most popular languages on an OSS site. That it said not popular 'in the enterprise' or 'in the business world' then I'd agree.

Not usually. I usually hear that it's either confusing or that people prefer functional languages with static typing over the dynamic flavor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com