A good point, well-made. I would edit my post, but I don't have much to add to your reply.
304 karma · joined December 21, 2012
Source: I was a Google engineer for 5 years.
And this is, in my opinion, the best possible argument in favor of using Clojure. Off the top of my head, I remember Rich Hickey saying something about how he developed Clojure due to his irritation at working on a huge project that wrote code to handle thousands upon thousands of interconnected nodes. That makes perfect sense.
However... writing a web app with Clojure, at least to me, doesn't.
This is sounding painfully close to No True Scotsman argument. Also, for the number of times I've heard Clojure programmers say this, you'd think I would have at least ONCE been shown some of the programmer's actual code, in an effort to provide a concrete example of how elegant Clojure is.
I'm not really arguing that Clojure code is "truly" difficult to understand, if that is taken to mean reasoning about its performance and effects. Rather, I'm talking about the fact that idiomatic Clojure code encourages writing functions upon functions upon functions, which continually builds up layers of abstraction that inherently make code more and more difficult to read. Example:
console.log("Hiya.");
console.log("How's it ");
console.log("going?");
vs.
printFirstString();
printSecondString();
printThirdString();
function printFirstString() { ...etc }
That could be. However, I believe it's more to do with the fact that idiomatic Clojure encourages continual definition of nested layers of abstraction. Which makes the code beautiful from a certain viewpoint. However, it's also very similar to essentially writing a new language and adding features to it. If you buy this comparison, then reading your own Clojure code is like reading code written in a language you wrote, which is tailored to your own ideas about aesthetics and interfaces.
Which is great. However, that would then mean that in order to read anyone else's Clojure code, you would have to learn a new programming language every single time. I would buy that this gets easier the more you do it, because my second programming language was definitely easier to learn than my first.
No, no I didn't. I was just making a joke.
This is true, and I've read some of the papers describing said structures and was blown away by the cleverness. However (and I don't have a source here, so please forgive me if I'm just totally wrong) I have watched many of Rich Hickey's hour+ long talks, and in one of them, I distinctly remember him saying that his vectors were "Within an order of magnitude of mutable vectors performance-wise, which is good enough for me".
I was... put off by that.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, it might have been Maps that he was talking about. I are not good at remember.
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.
It really depends on the method used. Simply using downvotes to indicate disapproval, while not a route I would personally go, is, in my opinion, a productive way to discourage negative content.
If it was used to mean "indicating disapproval", then I have absolutely no problem with it.
1) Immutable data structures are always going to be slower than their mutable cousins.
2) "Clojure code is beautiful" should be changed to "Your OWN Clojure code is beautiful". When I finished writing a compact piece of logic or data transformation, I was often struck with the beauty of it. When I tried to read someone ELSE's Clojure code, however, I couldn't even begin to make sense of it.
I am ever open to being proved wrong, however. Any Clojure programmers reading this, please reply with some code that is readable, elegant, and performant, to provide a counterpoint to my pessimism.
This is the most hilarious euphemism for "censorship" I've ever heard.
The context of "dropped out" is universally "The person went from participating to not participating". Alexis was never participating.
You might want to think a little bit about the fact that you are predisposed to believing that your efforts are not wasted.
If you spend the time to learn a new programming language, you're then predisposed to believing that it wasn't a waste of time, and are thus susceptible to confirmation bias, which causes you to ignore all evidence to the contrary.