> doesn't drive me mad, but it does puzzle ans annoy > me. puzzle: why is it? not sure, personally.
I've seen this pattern at the last 2 startups that I've worked at: The startup hires a bunch of people as they graduate from college. They are hired to do data analysis, typically on some kind of financial data (these are the types of startups I've been at). These newly hired people have a background in math and statistics. They learned programming by accident, incidentally. They learned Python, because that was what was recommended in all of the college classes that they took. Then they graduate and start work at the startup, and when they need to program, they do it in Python, because that is what they know. They are learning a great deal, very fast, about the business world, and financial analysis; they don't feel they have the time to learn about a new programming language. Meanwhile, from the perspective of the startup, the history of their decisions went like this: they had an idea, so they contracted with a team in India to build the prototype -- the founding team had no one technical on staff, so they went with the cheapest option, which was PHP. So the crew in India builds a flawed prototype in PHP. The basic idea for the startup was good, and they make some money, so after a year they hire a CTO, who immediately wants to scrap the prototype and build solid, high quality software. The decision is made to move away from PHP. But what should they move toward? They are already hiring a large number of data analysts who know Python, so the most obvious option is to hire more Python programmers, and standardize the company around Python. I've seen this pattern more than once. On Friday, March 24, 2017 at 6:17:15 PM UTC-4, Gregg Reynolds wrote: > > > > On Mar 24, 2017 5:05 PM, <piast...@gmail.com <javascript:>> 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. > > > doesn't drive me mad, but it does puzzle ans annoy me. puzzle: why is it? > not sure, personally. > > > 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 clo...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> > 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+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- 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.
