Clojurians Log v2
off-topic
is anyone else experiencing a lot of: > Something Unexpected Happened > This is certainly annoying, our apologies. Maybe a refresh would help. in CircleCI's front-end lately?
Circle is over, in my opinion. Too many bad decisions, it was my "CI of choice" now it's rubbish. I was locked out for 24 hours for triggering a job that failed. I asked them why I was locked out for "suspicions behavior" (the suspicious behavior being compiling a C++ code and trying to generate an AppImage) and they just ghosted me. Lots of problems in the UI (slowdown for complex workflows), the constant "push for AI" to explain errors and fix things for me (never worked, not even once)...
I tried to use n8n for automation because people were trained to use n8n, but it was simply slow and buggy and adds unnecessary friction to basic tasks. In the past, I used LabVIEW. While LabVIEW was far more reliable than n8n and was actually usable unlike n8n, it was not good for software development. n8n was good for teaching non-technical people how to use popular APIs, but it isn't good for production. People say n8n is easy, but that's a lie. I think n8n is actually more complex than python or clojure because its execution model is complex and fragile. Visual programming is a bad idea. People should learn coding in python or clojure if they want to automate basic tasks. While clojure is primarily an industrial-grade enterprise language, it can actually be a good language for basic automation tasks. Better than python for automation unless you need to run local inferencing. If you need local inferencing, you can use libpython-clj or create a python API endpoint with orchestration kept in clojure. Clojure is probably the best automation/orchestration language. I don't think there is a substitute for actually learning "some" coding. People who have to deal with information don't need to be an expert programmer, but they still need to learn "some" coding.
> Visual programming is a bad idea. 1. n8n is an opinionated view on visual programming, it can be rethought. 2. From a programmers standpoint maybe. But it is not representative point of view. I communicate daily with different kind of managers and I was astonished with difficulty of things they do in Fortran styled visual DSL which they find convenient. 3. Take a look at this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON I have top-secret rumors that something was done to port Clojure to Drakon.
After I used labview for months and n8n for a few days, I concluded that I don't want visual programming. I wrote haskell for a few months and got tired of its complex type system. I prefer textual functional programming without a complex type system. My favorite programming languages are dynamically-typed functional lisp languages.
Clojure enforces polymorphic discipline and functional discipline. Polymorphism imposes discipline on pointers to functions(indirect transfer of control). Functional programming imposes discipline on assignment by limiting assignments to tight performance-critical loops. Persistent data structures also impose discipline on assignment.
n8n complects evaluation with database transactions and various other housekeeping procedures. This complicates n8n's evaluation model. Textual programming languages don't complect evaluation with various other stuff. n8n looks simpler but is more complex than textual programming. I quickly became tired of n8n's complection of evaluation with various other things. n8n's evaluation model is worse than haskell's complex type system.
The conclusion is that if you want to make a software business, you better be a developer or have enough money to hire a developer. People are trying to avoid expensive programmers by using visual programming languages or hiring beginners who inevitably make messes. There is no shortcut to learning how to properly write code. If there were such shortcuts, I would have taken them myself. Division of labor exists because if you didn't specialize in one thing, you wouldn't be good at anything, and you wouldn't be paid much. Broke people are trying to avoid hiring expensive experts. That's why you need to be rich. When you are broke, you will bend over backwards to avoid spending money.