Why Clojure?

Did you move from CL because of hiring or another reason? I cannot imagine leaving CL and if I had to, I would go for abcl and then add clojure. Depending on the business that is of course. As long as I don't need to build a 1000s person tech team, I would not move; it's just far faster until you get to a scale where processes take over everything.

I feel like there’s a minimum developer quality that’s needed when using a language like Clojure, without static typing, and with a wealth of idioms and best practices that need to be followed and libraries that need to be known.

Without it it’s a matter of time before the codebase can’t be developed anymore and the software doesn’t work as intended.

You should give Gleam a shot. No REPL, but its simplicity, functional-ity and the BEAM lend themselves to the get-shit-done approach

Can you describe your stack and workflow ?

> which you can build things when you have the repl and interactive programming.

This is how I use Python to be honest. If I'm unsure of something, I just bust out the REPL.

While clojure has gained (accreted) more options of ways to run things, every single one of the ways you mentioned still work! It’s extremely stable in this regard. Nothing was taken away because there is a new hotness. Sure, things were added. Why is that bad at all?

I've always heard that the JVM[0] in general is considered to have a fairly high startup time compared to other common compiled language targets; is Clojure especially bad in this regard, or is this something that's frustrating coming from outside the JVM ecosystem that just adds additional friction when you're already trying to look into using new language?

[0] Not sure what the correct term is here, but I mean the official default one; I know there are other implementations, and my vague recollection is that there's at least one other one that's either sponsored or maybe even fully developed by Oracle, and that the OpenJDK version is the "canonical" non-enterprise one now anyhow, so saying " first party" feels like it might add more ambiguity than it would resolve

10+ years ago Clojure had a fantastic introductory experience. lein new and away you go. lein was so good and effective, for both tiny hello world projects and real production apps.

The experience has gotten worse and worse now for a decade. The core team have continued to take things in a worse direction (supported by a small group of fanboys) and most newcomers are now completely baffled by the tooling.

Call it “stalled” if you like, it’s stable and it’s pure joy. I can just get stuff done with Clojure. And things that may seem inactive, like that lib that you need that hasn’t had a commit in 8 years, turns out that it just works and doesn’t need to change. This is commonplace in Clojure.

Spec is still alpha and I’m not sure it will evolve more or if it’ll be something completely different. At least they’re not pushing you down the wrong path. Use/look at Malli instead of spec.

I don't know what you're talking about, 2 new versions of Clojure have come out since then, both of which have more substantive changes than the previous couple versions.

Spec isn't really essential to Clojure, and most people use Malli nowadays which is very actively developed https://github.com/metosin/malli

I see the fact that there isn't much happening with the language as a positive myself. I want the core language to be small and stable. The big difference with Clojure and most languages is that it makes it far easier to implement new semantics in user space. It has a powerful macro system and new ideas can be expressed using libraries instead of having to be baked into the core language itself.

Most language grow through accretion as usage patterns change over time. New end up features end up getting bolted on to facilitate that, and the language keeps growing. The problem here is that the scope of things people have to know keeps growing as a result.

Meanwhile, Clojure managed to stay small and focused, while different kinds of ideas are expressed using libraries. When a new idea comes along people can just use a new library, and they don't have to learn about all the previous libraries that worked differently. I think this is a huge benefit from user perspective.

But have you seen flow? I don't think it's stalled at all, and Nubank seems to have become an enabler to the ecosystem.

I mean, Datomic is free to use!

[core.async.flow]: https://github.com/clojure/core.async/commit/03b97e0b3e0ec32...

I used to hate JVM stacktraces but they’re incredibly useful and I miss them when I’m using other ecosystems these days. The way JVM exceptions do “caused by” when an exception is thrown while handling another exception gives so much more information than other languages. It’s also relatively simple to filter out the noise when you want a concise error message: just remove lines that start with a tab.

CIDER (the emacs IDE for Clojure) does a really good job of filtering the stack trace and presenting several views depending on what you care about. L

Usually there is also an error message together with a stack trace. I like stack traces: they are usually more informative than just an error message. I had lost too much time debugging Haskell exceptions where they by default do not come with any stack traces.

The only thing that really sucked is just the documentation. They are overly concise. You end up relying on non-official sources of documentation.

There are no Clojure stacktraces specifically, only JVM/Java ones. Clojure sits closely beside its host so there is no difference. People do complain about stacktraces and they've made some improvements. But they are long because the abstractions run deep and the function you passed in might be on the stack at the very bottom with the actual origination of the cause.

The repl isn't slow, what are you referring to?