Clojurians Log v2

I find it really strange that Python is so prevalent in the industry, given all its obvious issues.

I guess maybe this documentary addresses that

I don't, really. It's easy to get started with, easy to solve a first real problem. It has the great getting started story we need in the Clojure community.

Note that the reason I was compelled to share this was not to argue that Python is a good language or ecosystem — it's to highlight how effectively the documentary communicates the history and culture of Python. It feels like a story one can be part of!

simple vs. easy

Of course, simple and easy would be best.

in my job, we use python because our end users are biologists and chemists, and all their software experience is python. also python is the gold standard for scientific computing library support. there's an attempt to replace python in that niche with julia (very nice language, I have played with it at work as a potential python replacement), but python has a lot of inertia so julia faces the second system problem, where you need to be at least 10x better than the status quo before it seems like its worth switching

asterisk on julia being a nice language: I was able to segfault their compiler without an error message, which shouldn't be easy to do in your first week of tutorial examples and exploration

See also https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C0CB40N8K/p1756740508386249

I suppose you know this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD-QHbRWcoM

I attended PyCon 2013 and there was a huge amount of buzz about Python 3 and everyone said "five years" for a complete switch from 2.7 to 3... Is Py3 really the default everywhere now?

Pretty much, it’s difficult to find a system these days with python2 packages available for it

I've seen History of Clojure, yeah! It sure is interesting, but a presented research paper is quite different from a documentary.

I think most people (I hesitate to say everyone) are onto python 3 now, but I haven't written python in anger since 2019. I had some trouble with python3 in 2017, but those things were solved by 2019. Except big, commercial programs that embed a python version.

> The early culture building and how that culture was written into The Zen of Python (printed on import this) was exciting to me. I stopped using Python years ago, and partly that's because that short document felt like a mockery at that time. There were very, very few libraries that could've been considered as adhering to it. Eh, what of libraries... Python itself! Dang, I'm still salty about it. Me, years and years ago: "Why not make things consistent and rename some of the existing things, while retaining the originals for backwards compatibility?" Guido, paraphrased: "Extra maintenance burden would not be worth it." (The fact that Python 3 did rename some things notwithstanding.) Python, a few years later: "Let's move a bunch of shit around to make things more consistent. Lots of code will break, but people will fix it." More years later: "Let's invent four different ways to convey largely the same type information."

I have been learning python on the job, and there's a developer ergonomics (avoidance of special cases, intuitive shorthands where applicable) that I recognize as a likely influence on clojure. at least on a vibes level.

Rad! Would love to see a blog post / video / podcast at some point. Definitely one for #news-and-articles !

Cool event, too!

So awesome!! Way to go!! I’d been a pleasure talking though it with you. I’m so excited to see the finished product! Nice work!

I’ve definitely had to fix things mid-event myself. So nerve wracking, but since live coding in Clojure is the norm for me, it felt familiar. I was super careful, but Clojure made it an option. Nice job pulling it off!