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Comment by iLemming

5 years ago

https://twitter.com/lxsameer/status/1273546170137300992

> I wrote a #clojure program for logic A in 4 hours. I've been asked to rewrite it in #python because of some product requirements. It's been 3 days since i've started and still on the first 25% of it. Note: I'm using python for more than 13 years.

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iLemming

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Scarbutt  5 years ago

Yeah, no way that's true if his python and clojure knowledge are at the same level. That tweet sounds like what you see on r/clojure all the time, a cult.

  • iLemming  5 years ago

    After using a bunch of other programming languages professionally (for over fifteen years), I can confirm - Clojure is a cult. I am so stuck in it and have no desire to leave. Rich Hickey is a voodoo shaman or something. Don't you ever watch his talks and do not try Clojure! I have warned you!

  • lgessler  5 years ago

    It seems hard to say conclusively what is or isn't possible about differences in development time without knowing more about the problem domain. Since he mentions GIL in one of his tweets, it seems like his code must have involved concurrency, and Python and Clojure differ enough in this regard (to say the least...) that it seems believable that something that's easy in Clojure could be gut-wrenching in Python.

  • iLemming  5 years ago

    > That tweet sounds like what you see on r/clojure all the time, a cult.

    Check any Clojure forum - clojureverse, clojurians slack, mailing-list. Talks from conferences. Clojure/conj , ClojureD, ClojureX, etc. Click around, check the profiles. Then you'd probably see that majority of Clojure users are not that young. Most of them come to Clojure after learning other, very often multiple programming languages. Many of them have tried all sorts of different tools before finally discovering Clojure.

    You see it over and over again, people claiming that Python, and other popular PLs have little to offer in comparison to Clojure ecosystem. And your only explanation is "it's a cult"? Yeah, sure. Clojurists are just a bunch of losers who simply failed to learn Python. It is a pretty cool cult to be in, it is based on ideas endorsed by people like Guy Steele, Gerald Jay Sussman, Paul Graham, Matthias Felleisen, Brian Goetz, and many others.

  • praptak  5 years ago

    Just a language that isn't yet used widely in production. I remember when Python was like that, there is even a relevant xkcd strip: https://xkcd.com/353/

    Gosh, I remember when JAVA was like that!

    • iLemming  5 years ago

      > isn't yet used widely in production

      What are you talking about? Walmart has built their receipt processing in Clojure. Apple uses it (afaik for payments processing). Cisco has built their entire security platform in Clojure - security.cisco.com. Funding Circle has built their peer-to-peer landing platform in Clojure. Nubank - the largest independent digital bank in the world and sixth-largest bank in Brazil been using Clojure extensively. There are many other companies very actively using Clojure. Pandora, CircleCI, Pitch, Guaranteed Rate, etc. It's even used at NASA.

      It's a the third most popular JVM language after Java and Kotlin, and the most popular alt-js PL (if you don't consider Typescript as alt-js). It's the most popular language among PLs with a strong FP emphasis - it is more popular than Haskell, Elm, Idris, OCaml, Erlang, Elixir, F#, Purescript, and (recently) Scala.

      Clojure is very ripe for the prime-time. The ecosystem is really nice. A lot more nicer than most other languages. It is an extremely productive tool. But of course skeptics be like: "but it's dyyying ...", "it ain't popular ...", "but all those parentheses ...", "it's a cult ...", etc.