But why is it bad news if your competition don't use the best tool available (if it is true, of course)? I consider it a competitive advantage.
On the other hand, it is perfectly clear why everyone uses Python for ML and (almost) nobody uses Clojure: 1) All serious literature is in Python. There is almost no literature for Clojure. No, Pact books do not count as good literature in my opinion. 2) There are numerous turnkey solutions in Python. There are only partial solutions in Clojure. It doesn't matter whether Clojure is better or not; most people, naively in my opinion, want to become ML masters in a weekend or so, and Python gives them that promise. 3) I'm sure other people in the thread can come up with more reasons... What is the solution, then? Well, other than creating and releasing good software and writing about it, I am not sure. To return to the starting point: is it so important? Isn't it advantageous in some sense to have access to stuff that your competition doesn't have? On Friday, March 24, 2017 at 11:05:24 PM UTC+1, piast...@gmail.com wrote: > > > > > This did get me thinking though. If the community *did* want to score > highly > > on some of these metrics, what would those be? > > I'll be happy so long as Clojure is the popular choice for doing the > things where it's advantages should matter: machine learning, AI, NLP, > concurrent programming. > > It drives me crazy that Python is doing so well in all of the areas where > Clojure should be winning. There are such beautiful libraries for working > with vectors and matrices with Clojure, which should obviously help with > NLP, yet people use Python instead. Likewise, so much of machine learning > should be done as work in parallel, and Clojure makes that easy, yet Python > is preferred. Drives me crazy. > > These last few years I've been at a lot of NLP startups, and the choice of > Python makes me sad. > > > > > On Wednesday, March 22, 2017 at 7:17:10 PM UTC-4, Luke Burton wrote: >> >> >> On Mar 22, 2017, at 2:26 PM, Gregg Reynolds <d...@mobileink.com> wrote: >> >> very interesting stuff, esp. the sociological bits: >> >> http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017 >> >> sadly, clojure does not even rank in popularity. but it's number 1 in >> pay worldwide. o sweet vengeance! >> >> >> Some fun reading in there, Clojure features a couple of times. It would >> be fun to watch for spikes in traffic to Clojure related resources, because >> I'm sure that landing "most highly paid" will cause a few people to sit up >> and take notice. >> >> This did get me thinking though. If the community *did* want to score >> highly on some of these metrics, what would those be? Or do none of them >> adequately capture what is valued by the Clojure community? >> >> I think I'd claim that popularity is a terrible metric, even though it >> can be gratifying to be popular. The fact that lots of people do a >> particular thing doesn't mean that thing is inherently good, or worth >> striving for. Some very popular things are bad lifestyle choices, like >> smoking, a diet high in sugary foods, and writing JavaScript. >> >> Conversely some very, very good things can die from even the perception >> of being unpopular. We often get people asking on the subreddit why they >> find so many "abandoned" libraries in Clojure. The fact a piece of software >> might have been written years ago, and still be perfectly usable, is such >> an anomaly in more "popular" languages that people assume we've all curled >> up and died. I recently had a project steered away from Clojure (suffice to >> say it was a very good fit, I thought) due to concerns around the >> availability of Clojure programmers in the long term. In Silicon Valley. >> Where you can throw a rock in the air and be certain it will hit a >> programmer on the way down. >> >> Anyway, my personal metric for Clojure success would be: "for projects >> where Clojure is an appropriate technical fit, how often are you able to >> choose Clojure?" It's a selfish metric but the higher it goes, the happier >> I am ;) >> >> Luke. >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
