alt Hacker NewsI probably haven't expressed myself well. Your experience with Clojure is exactly the reason you haven't experienced what I'm talking about.
If you haven't used Haskell, I'd encourage you try to adding a small feature to an application written in it, such as Pandoc. Tell the agent what you want, then try to understand what it did.
Personally I love Haskell, but I think its over with in the age of agents. People will not put the work in to learn it because telling the agent it to do it is so tempting, but you've really got to struggle with it quite a lot to get over the initial hump.
If you actually bothered reading my post, you'd see that it is about why it's worth learning Clojure. Nowhere am I suggesting that you should let agents run wild on a language you aren't comfortable using. And the only people I've seen actually struggle with it are largely those who're deeply invested in the imperative style.
I actually started my FP journey with Haskell, and I found Clojure very easy to pick up after learning it because most of the concept transfer directly, and it's a much simpler language. If you love Haskell, I'm very curious what challenges you ran into that students I worked with, who had little to know programming experience, didn't.
I fully expect that people will, in fact, continue to learning new languages going forward. And my bet is that people will see value of working with high level languages like Clojure in agentic workflows. Imperative languages focus on low level details which are precisely what the LLM is great at automating. Languages like Haskell or Clojure focus more on declarative logic, and that's what the developer will need to understand going forward. But the advantage Clojure brings is the live environment which speeds up the development loop.
Your thesis appears to be that the language doesn't really matter when the agent writes code, but that couldn't be further from my own experience. I find the agentic workflow with Clojure is far superior to anything else I've tried for the reasons I articulate in the post. I built a large Rust app using LLMs, and all I can say is I'd never touch Rust again if I can help it. https://github.com/dirge-code/dirge
And of course, people have been talking about the demise of Lisp since before I was born. Yet, it's still here, it's still as useful as ever. And I doubt languages like Clojure are going anywhere in the future.