| HN Mirror

Sure, I used to work with Java EE in the enterprise. My team switched over entirely to working with Clojure over the course of the past 6 years. We build large applications for use at the hospital. For context, the projects I work on are typically implemented over several years by a team of 5-10 developers.

We find that our projects now have drastically less code doing the same types of things. Not only that, but the code we do write is predominantly declarative in nature. Clojure makes it much easier to separate the intent of the code from the implementation details.

Conversely, having less code means we're less attached to it. When it takes a 1000 lines to solve a problem, you tend to keep them around once you get a solution working. When you have 100 lines, it's much easier to throw them away and write a cleaner solution when you understand the problem.

Clojure projects are easier to debug and maintain thanks to pervasive immutability in the language. This allows us to safely think about parts of the application in isolation. When I come back to code that I wrote a few months ago and make a change, I know that the change is local and it's not going to affect another part of the project via side effects.

Clojure facilitates interactive development by providing strong integration between the editor and the REPL. When we're building new features, we're able to experiment interactively to see what approach will work best.

Since Clojure also runs in the browser with ClojureScript, we're able to use the same language for the full stack. This also lets us share code, such as validation logic, between the client and the server.

Meanwhile, we're still able to leverage existing Java libraries, infrastructure, and reap all the benefits of using the JVM.