Posts about Clojure
After having written several small projects over the past 9 months I'm leaving this language and want to outline some reasons for that decision such that anyone inclined can work towards bettering this ecosystem.Long post incoming.
In August '22 I spent a month doing haskell after I got a recommendation by a professor.I was also already using emacs since January of that year.I enjoyed functional programming and was just familiar enough with the paradigm as well as the best supported editor to give it a shot.Highlights of the coming months would be the strong support for higher order pipelines through the ->> operator, as well as the well thought out core data structures, especially maps.Another big appeal was the premise of "write clojure everywhere".
Initial on boarding with "Clojure for the brave and the true" was fine-ish.Definitely not as great as official resources from other languages such as the official python tutorial, the go tour or the rust book.But at the same time no worse than introductions to comparable languages, such as "Learn you a Haskell"
Going from the first few lines to the first few projects was okay-ish as well.Leiningen was well documented and introduced and libraries for most tasks exist.Some domains have several available libraries with no one bold enough to clearly mark one as the standard.This meant it took me a bit longer than it should to land on hickory for my html parser and cheshire for json, but it's fine in the grand scheme of things.
At some point I wanted to migrate to the official clojure cli.That experience was very rough and I'll go more into some details in the following section, but for now I must cite lack of well written tutorial / walk-through style documentation and lack of coherency.
Leiningen is a perfectly reasonable tool. The official clojure cli is not.Every relevant language today just does name build,name run or name install where you replace name with the tool name.Now fasten your seat belts for the official way to run a clojure program: clj -M -m my-code.coreBut let's assume that I want to actually build a jar file, I now have to:
add tools.build to my dependencies
write a whole
build.cljfileadd an alias to my
deps.ednfor actually building
So every once in a while I might want to write a program that doesn't take >1s to start.Both tools are probably about as good as they can reasonably be, given their ecosystem.Both are far from a drop-in replacement.
With babashka it's not too bad. Sure, many libraries aren't supported, but that's to no fault of borkdude. Not much needs to be rewritten and the things that do are not too painful.In an ideal case I wouldn't have to rewrite and could just choose it as my clojure implementation of choice, but it's tolerable.
Graalvm is way more of a mess. It took me weeks of occasional tinkering to get my application (a small cli youtube client) working with graalvm native image. If I hadn't accidentally used an older hickory version it probably would have never worked. I went on to go into the hickory codebase and bisect for the error, and at some point got contribution rights to hickory to upstream those changes. I also documented the issues for the next guy.Terrible experience.
Clojure is supposed to be the best lisp for the web, the best functional language for the web even.Being able to compile to both the jvm and javascript is a unique trait that no other language I'm aware of has.Yet, after getting motivated to pursue a small web application, I was totally put off.
Descision fatigue everywhere, in fact decision fatigue that is only matched by the incredible churn in the javascript ecosystem. Python has Flask and Django, Elixir has Phoenix, Ruby has Rails, Go has their standard library.Here I'm supposed to pick all the little components myself and end up with 5-6 different libraries that hopefully synergise? No thanks.
And that isn't even the bad part, that's merely a non-strengh. The bad part is the assumed domain knowledge. In clojurescript there are about a dozen react wrappers. None of them prominently link to a good getting started tutorial. It's like the clojurescript guy is supposed to already have extensive experience in js before starting. The backend is only marginally better tbh.
In some hypothetical ideal clojure ecosystem there would be reagent, compojure and a nice, open source book written about each of them.
Thankfully, there already exists a great talk on the matter that I do agree with: "How to Increase Clojure Awareness" by Artem Bramin at clojureU 2022 (link)
Especially that time to hello world needs to get seriously addressed if this language wants to have any hope of becoming relevant outside the FP niche.
Hello fellow Lispers,
I have now been writing clojure for about half a year and have been quite productive with it. Seems like a neat ecosystem with cider on emacs, some linters and clojuredocs.org open it's very productive. My problem is that my preferred domain of programming isn't well supported: web scraping.
The platform / binaries: I'd really prefer to make a binary, which when using clojure with web requests and/or some html parser seems nigh impossible, and it would be a hack either way through graalvm.
lquery > hickory: Clojures de-facto html parser (hickory) is pretty bad compared to what I can see at first glance checking out the cookbook.
no cons pair: r/lispmemes bullies us, but I'm sure there is some point in that I can't easily craft trees in clojure. Maybe I'm missing sth.
not only parens: Typing
{and[on a german keyboard requires significantly more finger contortion than(. Also paredit doesn't like the fake parens.
CLOS: I like functional programming and it's idioms, relying on higher order functions to implement most of what I do. From various corners of the internet it seems like CLOS is just the way you do serious common lisp development.
Missing sly inspector: Cider has an inspector where I can have a detailed view of the last eval's result in a split. Very useful for traversing dom trees whenever I have to, as that doesn't fit in the message area. Did I miss it with sly? Is it maybe available in slime?
No good clojuredocs.org pendant: I have only found the cookbook so far, which is neat for an overview and certainly a better starting point than practical common lisp for someone that already somewhat knows what they're doing in lisp. Do you guys have some website with definitions of the builtin functions along community submitted notes and examples?
Linters: You guys don't have those? Don't like those? Seems weird to me that decades old lisp critic and some linter from the lem dev is all that gets indexed by my search engine of choice.
Library discovery: How do I find what I need?
I'd really appreciate some input on the matter, as it would likely take a week or two until I'd be as productive in common lisp as I am in clojure and I wouldn't want to make the switch on a whim.
Edit (after 2h): to clarify on linting, I'm primarily looking for a replacement of kibit. This linter tells you when you miss idioms. e.g. you use (first (next x)) when (fnext x) exists. Or you use (not (= x y)) when (not= x y) exists.A formatter would be nice too, but I can definitely forego clj-kondo or eastwood like linters
Edit (after 7h): loving the engagement on this. It seems as of now like a scheme would be more aligned with my programming style and preferences. I've been particularly impressed by the talk A Guiler's Year of Racket. It seems to me like scheme trades a price in versatility and raw power for quality and coherence when contrasted with common lisp, and for me that's a worthwhile tradeoff
Edit (after 22h): racket it is!