alt Hacker NewsSure but do coding agents need this? They can create fixtures or scripts very quickly. No offence, but this article reads like a list of reasons you like Clojure.
I like many of the ideas in Clojure, but I never learned it, so it doesn't matter to me what advantages it provides to an agent if I can't understand the code its creating. This year I've done a lot of work modifying open source applications I use with agents, some in languages I don't know. One is Metabase, which is written in Clojure. Another is Forgejo, written in Go. I had no real experience with either language.
Go was much, much easier to understand in that context. I could review the agents changes and follow data flow, follow tests etc.
And no, its not because I'm more familiar with similar imperative languages. The last 14 years I've written the most code in Elixir and Haskell. Lots of Javascript, C++ and Python as well. Admittedly no Lisp other than a bit of emacs but semantically Elixir is probably closer to Clojure than most Lisps are.
In my experience they do. I use LLMs a lot, and one of the most common failure modes I see is that they implement stuff, but fail to wire it up end to end, or don't consider the broader context. The features of Clojure I outline in the post directly addressed the failure modes I've experienced using most other languages.
In fact, I've actually tried using Python and Js with LLMs initially because my logic was that these languages are more widely used and there's more training data. It's been a miserable experience for me, and I'm having a much better time with Clojure. I'm sharing my own experience here having actually used both types of languages, and the benefits I see in my workflow.
The fact that you're unable to learn Clojure is very much a you problem. I worked at a Clojure shop a while back where we hired university students regularly. They were able to pick up Clojure within a week or two and write useful code with it. The fact that somebody with over 14 years experience can't learn this language is absolutely surreal.