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by iLemming 2261 days ago
> It's not Clojure-dead

It never ceases to amaze me. Almost every single time, whenever there's a post or a comment on HN that mentions Clojure or Clojurescript, there's always someone from outside of the Clojure community attacking the language, saying things that are simply untrue. Like people are afraid of it becoming too successful. It's not some zero-sum game - the success of one language ecosystem doesn't mean that your other, the more favorite tool would be immediately forgotten.

Somehow I don't see Clojure people attacking other languages; they instead learn and borrow from them.

- Python people would be like: "you can't do machine learning stuff...", and what Clojure people say? Instead of fighting Python, they're like: "We can¹, and also We have nothing against Python, we'll figure out a way to talk to it from Clojure.²"

- Golang people would be: "CSP be is cool," Clojure people: "Awesome, we'll borrow it just the way how you did it. Also, we like Golang, we're going to write a Clojure interpreter and linter in it.³"

- R people: "Clojure is data-driven? Pfff... you know nothing about statistics ...." Clojure people: - "Oh yeah R is cool, btw. we've just figured out a way to interop from Clojure⁴."

- Elixir people: "BEAM is way better than your JVM crap...", Clojure people: "Not really, but okay, we see your point, we'll build Clojure on BEAM⁵"

- JS/TS people say things like "Modern Javascript is so nice, who needs Clojure now?" They get excited about stuff like React Hooks, and Clojure people: "Hmmm... actually we had a better way of dealing with stateful UI components for a few years now. We've been trying to tell you, but you never listened..."

They've been saying, "Clojure is dead" for years now. But despite all the odds, Clojure is very much alive and thriving. It's the most popular language within languages with a strong FP emphasis. Just look around - it has more books, more jobs, more podcasts, more conferences, and meetups than of Haskell, OCaml, Purescript, Elm, Elixir, F#.

I suggest people from other PL communities learn from Clojure people. It is a small but diverse and very friendly community of pragmatists - while others keep shoveling the same shit from one corner to another, trying to re-invent things over and over again, Clojurists keep borrowing good ideas and filtering out bad ones. And calmly and quietly keep building cool stuff and getting paid for it⁶.

¹ https://dragan.rocks

² https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

³ https://github.com/candid82/joker

https://github.com/scicloj/clojisr

https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl

https://bit.ly/3a3wxNH

1 comments

Hmm, I don't like the concept of talking about a programming community as e.g. "python people" in combination with stating something on their behalf.
You are absolutely right to correct me, I re-read my comment, and it does look hypocritical, which wasn't my intent. Paradoxically, in the spotlight of what you've said, it looks a bit like "bees against the honey" movement. After all, I myself one of those "Python people." My lame excuse is that English is not my first, second, or even third language. Choosing proper words and nicely phrasing things in it ain't my forte, but I'm trying my best.