"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing." - Alan Perlis
A lot clojure's culture and philosophy is centered around Rich's talks. I resisted this for a very long time. I'd rather spend 10 hours reading a book than 1 hour watching someone speak. I was wrong. Joy of Clojure is really a...well, maybe not an "advanced" clojure book. But it also definitely isn't a beginner's introduction. I've gotten rave reviews from very senior programmers about "Clojure for the Brave and True." Its whimsical style isn't for people who just want to dive into the nuts and bolts, but those people are almost definitely going to miss the bigger picture. Personally, I wound up loving clojure from the perspective of a python programmer. I got to python from c++ because I got fed up with all the stupid boiler plate code and time I wasted waiting on the compiler. >From there, I ran across enough people raving about common lisp to convince me to read http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ I spent a couple of years trying to do anything worthwhile with common lisp in my spare time. I kept hitting limitations in the C library layers. x can't work in 64-bit Windows. Y cannot compile on Thursdays. That sort of thing. I really, really wanted to turn that into my goto, every day, "my-time" programming language. And I just couldn't. The support base of people who are using it just is not broad enough. This is why clojure's decision to embrace the "hosted platform" thing is brilliant. Clojure on the JVM has access to anything that java can get to. ClojureScript has the potential to be even broader, since javascript. I still treasure fantasies of going back to common lisp. But, really, clojure has a better answer to a lot of modern computing problems. When I ran across clojure for the first time (because people I respected convinced me to look at it, even though I thought I knew that common lisp must be better), I hated it. This was way before lein, so you had to deal with all the baseline java stupidity to build your CLASSPATH. And the way it manages state seemed idiotic. I was a seasoned C programmer who thought I knew how to handle all the issues that came with multi-threading. I was wrong. It gets more complicated. Things like AWS lambdas push back on the problems that clojure solves. In a lot of ways, they force you to do the same things that clojure does naturally, because they're stateless. And they're a poor fit for clojure because its startup time still isn't great. This is all me rambling. I'm sorry. Is clojure a good language for you to learn now? Well, that depends on where you are and what you already know. I work with a bunch of people who went through the same programming 101 course. It forced them to learn things like Haskell and Clojure, because the professor is a technical programming weanie. I feel sad for these people and have to fight against them constantly because there is no way for them to appreciate what you get from a functional programming paradigm until you've dug the trenches and seen 1st-hand just how awful the alternatives are. I don't know where you are in your life/career, so I don't have any justification for offering this opinion. I'm going to anyway. I think that may be the litmus test for your question: have you hit the point where you think "there must be a better way to do this?" It never hurts to learn a new language. That's always a good idea. But, if you're still content with what you can do with python, then I advise you to keep working in python. Just keep clojure in mind the next time you hit an "OMFG! How did this bug escape into production?!" moment. It isn't a trivial transition. But it's almost guaranteed that translating your web server from python to clojure will make it more stable. Clojurescript is awesome, but (in this scenario), it's also just icing. On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 12:24 AM Dieter Van Eessen <dieter.van.ees...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Thanks, I'm currently reading the book you mentioned (Joy of Clojure). Just > started on 'Types, protocols and records'... > Still doubting if I should continue learning clojure. From my point of view, > the only major advantages of the language so far, are 'clojurescript' and the > idea that I can evaluate stuff that I've 'printed' (data is code is data). > Other than that, they are messing with my head by redefining existing > abstraction and making them 'almost equal but slightly different'. > > kind regards, > Dieter > > On Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 6:44:07 AM UTC+2, James Gatannah wrote: >> >> It might be worth mentioning that, ultimately, python class instances are >> syntactical sugar built around an internal __dict__. It gets twistier, since >> classes are also instances of the base class object. >> >> It would be tricky (though I've seen an example...maybe in Joy of Clojure? I >> think the author's conclusion was that it was an interesting experiment, but >> not worth doing in practice) to implement inheritance using clojure maps. >> >> For me, the conceptual difference has been that it's better to just write >> functions that work on simple data structures, rather than tying a few >> together into a unit that only work on a single data structure (plus its >> derived classes). Clojure's emphasis on functional purity is another major >> piece of this puzzle. >> >> Unit testing is one thing that becomes much easier with this approach. >> >> I deal with a ton of python code that has tests built around dozens of mock >> objects mimicking things like database records from an ORM. And then we mock >> out a few low-level HTTP calls in base classes so the class instances we're >> trying to test in isolation don't break when we run the tests with no web >> server to call. Then someone refactors the code, and all the tests break >> because they're tied to a specific package/module structure. >> >> By contrast, if you have your business logic in one set of pure functions, >> and you keep your side-effecting parts well isolated on the fringes of your >> system, you don't need any of that. Just call the business logic function >> with appropriate values and double-check the results. >> >> You absolutely can write python code that way. But your pythonic colleagues >> will hate you for it. >> >> Hope that helps, >> James >> > -- > 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 a topic in the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To unsubscribe from this topic, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/topic/clojure/qkepFF4qtbY/unsubscribe. > To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/clojure/9214c10a-8c9f-465a-9163-e1684d919693%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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