More like Lisp mugs the language, whispers "Greenspun's" into its ears, then flees into the night, leaving the poor language benighted and useless once more.

I don't use octave -- but open source economics are pretty F-ed up if the lead dev of something as big as octave can't get enough funding to work on it full time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575

The Free Software Foundation does fund the GNU project, but most GNU projects are completely volunteer-run.

Just got assigned back to a plain JS project and the first thing I had to do was migrate a lib over a major version bump with tonnes of breaking changes...... for a bug fix 😞

... because API renaming is requirement for major version bumps and everyone else is doing it. deprecation warnings is not an option.

I’m happy I normally have to do very little plain JS. Never was really into front-end. But very much like clojurescript using re-frame.

What kind of front-end frameworks and libraries do people use with Clojurescript?

@amdt: om, reagent, re-frame

^ and rum 😄

Thanks, I’ll take a look at those. I don’t do front-end JS myself, but it’s been on my radar.

The most I’ve done is spaghetti jQuery.

It gets very messy with the event-handling callbacks.

@amdt, ...I haven't used rum, but of the three I have, reagent is the least opinionated and om the most, with re-frame in the middle.

@amdt, ...if you want to get started quickly with something that won't try to mandate how you do state management, then reagent is the easiest place to start; if you want something that'll guide you towards having centralized state (which certainly has advantages -- easier state serialization; time travel/undo support/history; concrete understanding of where and what your possible state changes are), you can either put re-frame on top of it, or go all the way to Om.

@tbaldridge Taking donations to open source Shen and then immediately thereafter moving all further development to closed source didn't help things for me.

I'm not judging and this question comes purely from my ignorant point of view: why would anyone want to use a non-free programming language? What are the advantages?

can you give an example of non-free programming languages?

@dpsutton Wolfram Alpha, MATLAB

I was thinking about shen

> why would anyone want to use a non-free programming language? What are the advantages? matlab is widely used in academia and engineering. I'm not sure what free/non-free have to do with anything, really

I’ve never used matlab, but people I know who have say Python with Numpy is better, not just because it’s open.

In this day and age, closed can’t compete in many cases. Just too shallow of an intellectual gene pool (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?)

its just a weird attribute to talk about with respect to competing

like clojure can't compete with matlab because one is open and one isn't?

C# is open and shen is closed but I doubt anyone has contrasted them in this way, nor would anyone be swayed one way or the other

and i'm not sure if you mean standards based or just some license on the language, or tooling or whatever

Yeah, it's not that it can't compete, but it's more like a Language is such a fundamental part of the programming thought-process and such a integrated part of the lives of the programmers, that programmers seem unwilling to invest time in learning a closed language.

i'm not sure that's true though

especially with the example closed source language of matlab

i thought the problem with shen was that it was just another lisp

so why choose it over chicken and others

right, but what's the history of matlab, how much of that is the industry pushing it on new users?

From what I understand, shen has some nice concepts when it came to bootstrapping, but I lost interest when I heard it wasn't open-source.

really. huh

i guess i've never looked at a language's source

but you are a team member of a language, so I wonder if your experience is wide spread

and are you on a jvm language because java is open source?

yeah, to that I don't know. And now that I think about it most of the "pro-shen" stuff I've heard has been related to language implementor stuff.

yeah, its features, not the license of the language

e.g. it's apparently the most portable lisp. But I doubt most users care about that

about clojure? that's why i like it. it's a lisp who's runtime won't get you fired

OTOH, I completely agree with the "unwilling to invest time in a closed-source language" argument.

Just as it's a risk to build a bunch on infrastructure tied to a closed-source database whose owner can relicense it or withdraw it from market at whim, it's a risk to invest in building one's skillset on a closed-source set of tools, plus a risk to build significant software/infrastructure on same.

I mean, yes, it's also a risk to build on an OSS project that doesn't have enough uptake to ensure ongoing investment

but with Clojure, for example, Rich could throw in the towel tomorrow, and the project would keep going -- it's not at the whims of any single party.

granted, though, that's not universal. Lots of folks have built applications on top of Visual Basic

Mathematica is certainly an exception, but... well, it's an exception, it has clear superiority inside a well-defined niche, and it certainly is hurt by its status as non-OSS software if one measures by marketshare -- I can't imagine Python having the mindshare it does inside numerical/scientific computing if Mathematica didn't cost money. Speaking for myself, and acknowledging this as sample-size-one, I don't know Mathematica and do know Julia for reasons that can be directly linked to licensing model and pricing.

challenge: i need to get clojure into this company

i built some internal tools in clojure

we weren't a java shop either

its nice to have at least two of you interested

that is helpful

reporting websites that just generate some tables are super easy