2,057 karma · joined December 8, 2014
The big issue is the home server community being overly focused on creating "battle stations" that look cool and run 40 different Docker containers rather than simple low-power solutions.
In fact, at my old job, the entire team learned Clojure on the job. I was the only hire who had learned it prior to being hired. Our codebase was fine and very maintainable.
The other teams were similarly new to Clojure. Most people spent a few months doing increasingly more advanced things until they were comfortable with the language and the codebase.
The main issue for complete beginners is learning to grapple with the different development setup compared to what they might be used to, i.e. interactive development on a live system using an editor-integrated REPL. We basically set everyone up with IntelliJ and parinfer. Paredit was optional, as was alternative editors such as emacs.
IntelliJ + parinfer is a similar development experience to Python. The only part that is foreign in that case is the interactive development of a live system which the new devs quickly come around to seeing the benefits of. It helps having seniors who point out the new concepts.
The choice is between Leiningen and deps.edn AKA the official Clojure CLI. Personally, I switched to deps.edn back in 2020 and haven't looked back. I like that it's simpler/does less out of the box and I also use the Git dependency feature all the time (you can reference a git sha as a dependency, not just Maven coordinates).
Something like 90% of it is just listing dependencies (the same packages as it's all just Maven anyway) and for the remaining 10% of configuration there's plenty of resources available for both. They can also interop to some extent.
Other ecosystems have it much worse than Clojure in this regard.
The one on Matrix 2.0 has some cool demos.
Of course, I'm paraphrasing this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
Second of all, notwithstanding interference with reader macros, then no, it isn't completely trivial unless what you're suggesting is just pointless string substitution, which would also make e.g. 1(2 3) be equal to (1 2 3).
If what you're suggesting is having an enforced hard split between lists and function/macro invocation, that pretty much just makes everything harder to do with no perceivable gain, other than looking a bit more like C-based languages. It's a bit like enforcing that any strings that are parsed as numbers somewhere in the source code must be defined using "..." while strings that aren't must use '...' instead.
The entire point is that you can manipulate code as data structures. You can rewrite the rules of the language by returning data structures. There's no reason to make this more complex.
Often, it will be interpreted to be a function call or a macro invocation in the eval step (the E in REPL).
You can sidestep this behaviour using the ' reader macro (i.e. quote) as you mentioned yourself. Quoting disables this behaviour for the form that the reader macro applies to. Reader macros occur in the R step (i.e. before the E in REPL).
It is a list data structure. There are many examples of lists which are never interpreted as function calls in Lisp, since macros run before evaluation and can change the default behaviour, e.g. in
(defun increment (x) (+ x 1))
The Council and Parliament work like different chambers in the EU system, kinda like the Senate and the House in the US, but it's the prerogative of the Commission to propose new laws.
Elections work similarly in any European parliamentary system. Prime ministers are also indirectly elected in those systems.
The main difference is that the executive (the Commission) is the only one that can propose laws in the EU, but the other EU lawmakers can still amend legislation.
(just stating this for people reading the comments, not specifically for you)
So, for example, on particularly windy days here in Denmark, we pay almost nothing as our entire demand will be covered by wind energy. On other days we might pay a lot since we need to import energy produced from gas or other expensive sources.
Personally, I don't really see the value though. I prefer to create modules of mostly pure functions, testing them in the REPL using Rich comment blocks.
I don't blame Americans or others for not knowing this, but the amount of bad takes about the GDPR by Silicon Valley people in particular is so ridiculous. Every single comment section about a GDPR topic on HN has a bunch of Americans talking about how Europe is some backwards, regulatory hellhole, always talking from a position of total ignorance.
You usually see the distinction between "functional" and "advertising" cookies in those annoying banners, where you of course can't disable the former as that data is core to the functionality of the website. And guess what, if you don't do any shady stuff with user data you don't even need to display any banner (the banner is for getting explicit permission from the user to potentially do shady stuff).
You write that speed can be inferred, but the analogy that was used here is BitTorrent—and my experience with BitTorrent tells me that it certainly cannot be inferred.