[e12e]

> Today, we're building Vade Studio with just three developers – myself and two developers who joined as interns when in college. (...) Here's what we've accomplished: (...)

In how many man-hours/days? It's hard to know if the list is long or short only knowing that calendar time should be multiplied by three for calculating people time spent...

[pntripathi9417]

We started working on it full time around 1.5 years ago.

2 years if you count when I exploring building it in other languages.

Alongside building Vade Studio: I have been working as a contractor for 2 clients. Developing systems for them Other two developers have been managing their college curriculum as well.

I am not sure how to do the math around it, but anecdotally I don't think this would be possible in any other environment.

[iLemming]

> I don't think this would be possible in any other environment.

A few years ago, I worked in a small group (6 devs) for a retail business. We had all sorts of different third-party integrations - from payment processors to coupon management and Google Vision (so people wouldn't upload child porn or some other shit through our web and mobile apps). The requirements would constantly change - our management would be like: "Hey guys, we want this new program to launch, can we do it next week?", then a day later: "Turns out we can't do it in the state of Tennessee, let's add some exceptions, okay?", then some time later: "Folks, we really want to A/B test this but only for a specific class of customers..." Jesus, and it wasn't just an "occasional state of affairs" every once in a while; it was a constant, everyday, business-as-usual flow. We had to quickly adapt, and we had to deploy continuously. We had several services, multiple apps - internal, public, web and mobile, tons of unit and E2E tests, one legacy service in Ruby, we had Terraform, containers, API Gate, load balancers, etc.

I can't speak for myself, but a couple of my peers were super knowledgeable. They used all sorts of tools and languages before. I remember my team-lead showing me some Idris features (tbh, I don't even remember anymore exactly what) and asking my opinion if we should find a way to implement something like that, and I couldn't hide my confusion as I didn't know nothing about Idris.

Numerous times, we had discussions on improving our practices, minimizing tech debt, etc. And I remember distinctly - many times we have speculated how things would've turned out if we used some other stack, something that's not Clojure. We would explore various scenarios, we even had some prototypes build in Golang, Swift and Kotlin. And every single time, we found compelling and practical reasons for why Clojure indeed was the right choice for the job.

Sure, if we had a larger team, maybe we could've done it using a different stack. But it was a startup, and we had just the six of us.

[j45]

If it took fewer lines of code that's something to consider too.

[iLemming]

Yes, Clojure can be very terse without being extremely cryptic. Even simple data representation, if you compare JSON and EDN - the latter would be almost twice as compact yet remain more readable than JSON. Clojure is not as terse as e.g., Haskell, but I think it wins by being more pragmatic. Of course, some seasoned Haskelites may disagree, in some rare cases, Haskell can prove to be fantastically pragmatic, but let's agree not to go down that rabbit hole of argumentation.

[j45]

That's a nice point, it's not about the shortest or the most verbose code.. maybe where relevant, something one or more people can learn quickly and become productive in contributing value.

With many languages and frameworks having a decent amount of similar functionality and performance available, more and more is left to personal preference and interpretation of what to use.

Popularity might matter when trying to hire juniors. Given how many juniors seem to appreciate sincere mentorship when it's mutual, I'm not super sure on this anymore.

Popularity might not matter when trying to hire other types of developers, including seniors. It's less about what's popular, or the right badge to signal.

Of the polyglot folks I get to know and are humble about their smarts, it's interesting how many independently have ended up on Clojure, or a few others. Universally there's usually a joke of how long can bash scripts do what's needed until a decision has been tied in.

[iLemming]

> Of the polyglot folks I get to know and are humble about their smarts, it's interesting how many independently have ended up on Clojure

Yeah, Clojure is a weird thing. I myself, after using numerous different PLs - ranging from Basic/Pascal/Delphi to .NET languages like C#/F#, then later Python and, of course, "script" options like Javascript, Typescript, Coffeescript, and many others - still never felt like ever obtaining "the polyglot" status. I just went from one language to another, and every time it felt like burning the old clothes. I was always a "Blub programmer" at any given point of my career, every time moving from one "Blub PL" to another.

Learning Clojure somehow renewed my passion for the craft and forced me into deeper understanding of core programming ideas. Ironically, long-abandoned old friends became more familiar than ever before. I don't know exactly how that happened. Either because of the hosted nature of Clojure that forced me to always be on at least two different platforms at the same time - JVM and Javascript - or maybe because it exposed me to a lot of smarter and more experienced people than ever before. Maybe because of "Lisp-weirdness", thinking how to program with "no syntax" or being forced to think in terms of "everything is a function" where you don't even need primitives, even numbers, since you can express just about anything with functions. It could be because Clojure is of sufficiently higher level, it forced me to work on more complicated problems; I really can't say. One thing I know: I was a "Blub" programmer before Clojure. After a few years of Clojure, I have become an "experienced Blub programmer" in the sense that I no longer care in what programming language I need to write, debug, troubleshoot, or build things, with maybe a few exceptions like Haskell, Prolog and Forth - they'd probably require me to put on a student hat again to become productive, even though I know some bits of each.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make this "about me." What I'm trying to say is that I am sad that it took me years of wasted time. I wish someone had truly forced me into learning something like Clojure sooner, but again, maybe learning Haskell would have had the same or even better effect. I just want to encourage young programmers to try different languages instead of obsessing with their favorite ones. "Well," you may say, "aren't you right now fetishizing Clojure?" Here's the thing - I don't really consider Clojure any different from numerous other Lisp dialects I use - for me, all Lisps feel like the same language. The mental overhead of switching between Clojure/nbb/Elisp/Common Lisp/Fennel/etc. is so small, it's not even funny. Even jumping between Typescript and Javascript (same family) is more taxing than switching between different Lisps. Perhaps, true value of Lisps (including Clojure) is not so much technological - maybe it's rather cerebral and epistemic.