@emccue well, it's a piece (or few pieces) of a larger ecosystem built on top of kubernetes. Nothing really special, fullstack clojure (including css with garden), aleph, compojure-api, spec, postgres (this was the part that was most slowing us down, should have used something like datomic but that would have been too hard to push through considering that would have been something that would have affected stuff outside our containers)

re-frame on ui-side

I did write one thing which allowed us (or should I say I) very fast and I'm considering rewriting it into a full library during the fall and releasing it as opensource

oh and right, "what aspects of Clojure did help you out": - REPL driven development - Data orientation - Same language both on backend and frontend -> code sharing - Spec - Sensible approach in libraries which makes them not to be in way like they tend to be in most languages

Also it helps that I've been writing stuff to production with Clojure for six years. Not all the time been using Clojure, some Java, Scala, JavaScript, TypeScript etc in between but I would say that about half of my working time has been writing Clojure full-time

So definitely no time spent on learning stuff, just making stuff happen

@niklas.collin I’m curious, as you’ve been using all those languages in production for this long, what are the biggest differences you see in long-term usage?

Right. Well, I would say that Clojure is NOT the sweet-spot for big monolithic systems. That's where static typing really starts to shine

But in today's world one tries to avoid big monolithic systems for several reasons so that kinda makes that a moot point

Java is actually a very good language especially after Java 8 and beyond. I personally highly prefer Java over Scala

Scala is overly complex language and it's full of unnecessary stuff which makes it just even more complex. Scala's philosophy is to minimize the amount of code you have to write. However, this is quite often done via syntatic sugar and one can write the exact same thing bytcode-wise in several different ways. Add to the fact that it is both functional and object oriented language, it doesn't have immutability by default but it has support for immutability so you can have both etc and you have a mess in your hands

also scala compiler is super complicated and compilation times are just horrendous

But one of the biggest problems with Clojure are: 1) code can degenerate pretty easily, one has to be pedantic when writing it. This means that Clojure is not that great language for below-average programmers. I think Clojure will never be a mainstream language due to this specific reason 2) REPL-driven development is great but unfortunately that tends to lead into situations where tests are not written. Where in Java for example, one needs to write tests in order to call your piece of code in isolation, with REPL you can do that trivially. REPL is great but with great power comes great responsibility and you must remember to also write the tests if you do not want your application to degenerate into a steaming pile of s**t 3) There are not that many developers out there who know Clojure. Because of this choosing Clojure is always a maintenance risk. This can of course be fixed by using Clojure more and thus exposing more developers to it, but this is not always a realistic scenario business wise

And when we go to browsers I can only say that NPM ecosystem is insane. There's so many things wrong there that I do not know where to begin. ClojureScript however has a much more sane ecosystem. It might be due to the fact that it is minuscule compared to NPM but whatever the reason it is much more sensible. In JavaScript land when you have a problem you start looking for a library, you add that as a dependency and then call that. This is why when you add some dependency you get gazillion transitive dependencies with it. The infamous 'leftpad' library is an extreme example of this but it actually describes the problem pretty well. With ClojureScript one can relatively trivially write a lot of functionality which would require surprising amount of code in JavaScript. This is partly due to the language but it's more about better designed libraries and how to use those. Take Reagent for example and compare that to pure React. Creating a new component in Reagent is just simply writing a function. Nothing special, nothing complex, nothing new to learn with the small exception in how you should call that function (use [component]instead of (component)). This combined with re-frame which is infinitely better designed version of what redux is trying to do provides a vastly superior productivity and expressiveness over JavasScript or TypeScript which actually just adds code due to static typing declarations.

hope that answers your question @henrik?

Very thorough, thanks @niklas.collin. It sounds overall like you’re more bullish about ClojureScript than Clojure.

Well, both are extremely good but I think ClojureScript makes a bigger difference in general yes

But if you are writing a backend which is data transformation heavy then you are more likely to get much better productivity with Clojure than with Java or Scala for example

because that's Clojure's sweet-spot

I would not write an opengl engine with Clojure due to how GPUs work and how opengl has been designed (it's a mutable state machine)

but most of the work I do are business systems with web frontend (if any). Usually it's about receiving or retrieving data, processing it and then dumping it to somewhere (to client, to database, to another API or whatever)

that's where Clojure is at it's best and thus it is without doubt the best tool for me for most of the business problems I'm trying to solve

The recruitment situation when running a business is one of those things that comes up in conversation for every language that has below Java/JS amount of uptake. I guess it comes down to whether you think Clojure will remove more overhead than the overhead you will take on in recruitment, when finding the right person for the job.

Indeed

a competent person can learn Clojure especially if that person has someone to mentor him

but as a consultant I'm constantly facing this question from my clients

"when your contract has ended how do we maintain this thing?"

and it's a very valid question

I've chosen Java several times over Clojure due to this specific problem. I've also told the customer that if I go the Java way then it will take me 2-3 times more time to do the exact same thing

sometimes the need for ensuring the availability of competent developers surpasses the extra cost included due to using inferior tools

it's a business decision

it's sad that business decisions can dictate technical tool choices but that's life

The more critical system we are doing the higher the propability we are not going to use Clojure. Not because Clojure wouldn't create a robust system but due to the availability of developers

But if I was working in a product development company I would not hesitate to use Clojure

after all, then I would be there to mentor all the new guys coming in

And yet it seems like there are a few companies out there with a lot of Clojure devs

yup, I'm in Finland and the amount of Clojure devs is very high here comparably

thanks to Metosin guys and especially Jarppe who started the adoption of Clojure in finnish consultancy companies

but still, for every developer in Finland who knows Clojure there's are AT LEAST 50 developers who know Java but not Clojure

but the amount of Clojure devs in Finland is starting to be high enough that I can actually use Clojure in actual customer projects, not all the time but every now and then

and a fun fact is that if we manage to use Clojure in a customer project then usually customer is super happy about the results and starts to demand Clojure from other parties too 🙂

And yet I’ve seen that there are companies that manage to find a lot of people for their Clojure dev positions. I guess they’ve got processes in place for mentoring and so on. And if you’re large enough, I suppose you can sustain such a process more easily given the same percentual employee turnover as a small firm.

So, why does Clojure fit so well with the Finnish psyche, I wonder 🙂

Lower tolerance for bullshit?

we train a lot of juniors in clojure, it's surprising how quickly they get it.

@dominicm What do you look for in a candidate for a junior, mentored position?

@henrik Someone who wants to learn often stands out.

Clojure is relatively easy to grasp once you get past the "parenthesis problem" 🙂

But without a mentor if you have no experience in Clojure and you get a system written in Clojure before you it's going to be a very daunting experience

Like it would be in most languages but since Clojure is so different from mainstream it is even harder to get without someone telling you why it's like this

it's a form of unintended vendor lock-in which is morally questionable

Thanks @dominicm and @niklas.collin. I’m soon going to find myself in a position where I’m in the mentoring seat. I’m largely self-learned myself, and I’ve never worked with Clojure devs, so any help with regards to selecting good candidates would be extremely welcome.

Look for people who can explain why immutability is good, people who know about functional programming and who understand data processing problems. Usually these guys are those who have felt the pain which Clojure can help with and thus they will pick the language quick and be very happy with it

I recently saw an RDF/Fuseki/Clojure library somewhere. Can’t remember which. Any hints?

found it: https://github.com/arachne-framework/aristotle

@niklas.collin what if, hypothetically, you were the kind of below average programmer that has code degenerate easily. What kinds of pitfalls can one fall into when programming clojure for real projects? Asking for a friend.

Richard Stallman (RMS) is coming to my uni to give a talk about free software. What should I gift him?

Office 365

I imagine he would prefer some kind of gesture. Maybe say you helped 4 people install free operating systems or something like that.

I would, but I helped install Ubuntu and I dont think he would be happy with that

well maybe a gift would be switching to a more free version and tell him you did it for him?

free beer \o/

@pablore I believe he used to, on his personal web pages, recommend charities to donate time/money to. I would scour those first, make a donation in his + your uni's name. I would not give him any stuff or things, he will just throw it out.

Doesn’t he have a lengthy page about how he wants to be treated including gift advice?

> Many holidays have become commercialized: corporate PR has taught many people that buying things for their friends or relatives on these days is "the thing to do", and the truest expression of love. I dislike the feeling that I am obliged to give a gift for some meaningless event, and get no particular pleasure from receiving gifts under these circumstances either, and hiding the fact that I don't like a gift makes me feel quite uncomfortable. I opted out of these forms of ritual consumption back in my teens, and I am glad I did. doesn't like gifts due to a holiday. unclear if this is general gift or not

https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/m/#!msg/mysociety-community/zkyZpOXjgoQ/_8xyXSxv9zYJ

Is what I was remembering

> DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. very comprehensive

It’s a hell of an effort, trying to return an unwanted Norwegian Blue to the shop. Perhaps he’s just trying to save himself the effort.