alt Hacker NewsMy thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
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> I am now generating this website with Clojure
As everyone knows, you are not a true lisper until you have written your own static site generator.
It gave me such a great high with how easy it was to add my own "templating engine" on top, implemented all using macros. The downside is that the crash came hard; there is so much more to a good static site generator such as optimizing the output, supporting scoped CSS, server-side rendering of SPA framework components, and of course integration with the Node ecosystem (for better or for worse there is just so much useful stuff). I have since moved over to Astro. It's still fascinating how far I was able to push my own SSG all by myself though.
Once you learn Clojure's syntax and semantics, you're no longer bound to the JVM. There's ClojureScript (JS), ClojureCLR, ClojureDart, jank (C++), Basilisp (Python), babashka (SCI), and many others. This means that, if you don't know Java or don't like the JVM, you can likely use Clojure wherever you already feel most comfortable.
For the most part, any Clojure code which doesn't use host interop will work on all dialects. Clojure also has support for conditional code, depending on the current dialect.
This is one of Clojure's superpowers.
With respect, this topic in particular has been beaten to death.
I too liked Clojure when I tried it some years ago (agreed on the composition and data structures; both are _great_). But the real value-add is in the runtime, not the syntax. Java has a solid runtime but it's not yet as good as Erlang's, maybe even not up to the standards of Golang -- I am talking concurrency / parallelism here (for memory management I have no doubts Java is very good). And I know: green threads and stuff. Well, call me when you can do what Erlang / Golang can do. Then I'll look again, very seriously too.
Programming language syntax scarcely matters. It does to some extent but we the programmers tend to over-romanticize it. The runtime and its properties are the much better thing to optimize for.
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I spent a week with Clojure and coming from other functional languages my problem was not Clojure, it was dynamic typing. I got strange bugs in the standard library because I accidentally sent in nested incompatible instances of objects and it was really hard to figure out what was wrong in a quick way. With typesafe languages you are stopped at compile time.
> Clojure makes a big point of being a hosted language, that is, a language that runs on a premade runtime.
This is why I am found of the community, the symbiotic approach of two language communities working together.
> I do wish there were an easier way to move in the ]}]})))}-ness of block ends though.
I’m not quite sure what this means. How is it different/worse than all parens..?
fyi I use paredit and just hit ) and it moves me past any kind of paren/bracket. But even without that you can just hit left and right..?
The functional paradigm is a bit uncomfortable at first, but it does make problem solving feel... different. I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me.
Most models do not perform particularly well in Clojure, but OpenAI models fully utilize the power of the language. Subjectively, it kind of seems to match the personality. Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?provider=openai
I wonder if the author is familiar with Smalltalk - it has a very small syntax. In some ways so does Lisp, in other ways it has more than every other language, depending on what you think about operators versus functions.
Cached: https://archive.ph/lzYld
"Lua: everything is a table
Tcl: everything is a string
Lisp: everything is a list"
Python: {"everything":"dictionary"}
I am able to see the link just fine.
That gradient tho
;; This is real syntax!
(loop for k being the hash-keys
using (hash-value v) of hash-table
...)
I think the issue is heavily due to syntax though. Naturally the (())()()()(), but I think even aside from the (), the syntax does not seem super-efficient to me. Perhaps I have spent too much time with ruby and python, but it feels as if lisp is a legacy regression, purely syntax-wise.
> The seq abstraction, for example, means I usually don’t have to worry about what kind of sequence I’m dealing with
Eh? That's completely lifted from CL (https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/t_seq...). Same for AREF/NTH, there's ELT.
Other than that, I agree, CL is baroque yet needs some hole filling here and there.
> Lisp: everything is a list
But that's wrong. Not even a little. Unless you mean LISP 1.5...
> Too much syntax
Funnily, I'm mostly okay with the new vector/set/hash-table literals, my big problem and that of some other people is the use of vectors in macros/special operators instead of lists. `(let [a b] ...)` instead of `(let (a b) ...)` is _not_ okay.
I’ve been using Clojure for almost 10 years and it still feels like a foreign language to me. I call it “parenthetical hell”.
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> "I do wish there were an easier way to move in the ]}]})))}-ness of block ends though."
If he means navigating the AST, there is Parinfer: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
Paredit / Parinfer ruined other languages for me. It lets you navigate up/down/in/out of the Clojure AST with keyboard commands and mutate those expressions, e.g. "Split" will split open the current data structure you're in: `(a| b)` =Split=> `(a)| (b)`, where | is caret. Join is the inverse, and it works for all data structures.