The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp Languages (2016)

Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by yogthos on Monday July 02, 2018 @09:30AM (#17441441)

Clojure is past its hype phase, but it's certainly not dying. The yearly surveys consistently show more and more people using it professionally. It's used by large companies like Apple, Boeing, and Walmart for important large scale projects, and both the ecosystem and the community continue to grow at a steady pace. I've been working with Clojure for over 8 years now, and I've seen the community grow tremendously over that time.

My view is that Clojure has enough critical mass now that it's not going anywhere. There is a large community that's very active and enthusiastic about the language. There are many companies building their businesses around Clojure, and it's only going to continue to get better.

I don't think Clojure is ever going to become a mainstream language like JavaScript or Python, but that's very different from saying that it's dying.

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by kbuchanan on Monday July 02, 2018 @11:58AM (#17442755)

Clojure, like so many of the functional languages, struggles to attract beginners. I mean for rilz beginners.

I don't mean it's unsuited to them. My company has a developer with one year of Javascript programming experience productively working in Clojure. But, I think often about how hostile FP's vocabulary is to non-experts. (Personally, the baggage I brought from OO made FP incomprehensible for quite some time). Clojure documentation, and most tutorials aimed at it, for example, take for granted newcomers' comprehension. If we could measure the average number of languages a programmer brings to the table when he learns Clojure, I'd be willing to bet it's more than two.

Ruby and Python on the other hand are languages where beginners thrive! Not only are many of the language concepts self-evident, the communities are often driven by recently graduated beginners spawning beginner-level documentation, beginner-level sympatico, etc.

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by jandrese on Monday July 02, 2018 @03:20PM (#17444598)

I think the rule is the more mathematics background you have the more natural functional programming will feel. Most programmers didn't take math electives in college.

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Re:The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp... by workinfunk on Monday July 02, 2018 @12:46PM (#17443222)

I and a few others in my workplace are Clojure beginners. It's really not hard to pick up once you suck it up and stop bitching about parentheses. I don't think the language owners are terribly concerned about picking up beginners though, for all it seems they may actually like Clojure's reputation as belonging to Serious Programmers.

My biggest beef is actually with all the lisp true believers who wax on about their moment of clarity when all the pieces fit together and they realized that the universe is written in lisp. So far for me, it's just code.

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