Ask HN: What barriers prevented you from using Clojure? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What barriers prevented you from using Clojure?

7 pointsj_m_b2 comments

I love Clojure and I want to see it being more widely adopted. There was recently a comment on HN where someone said that they had issues getting Clojure to run due to the fact that the package managers Leiningen (lein) and boot would not work properly for them. They also had issues with libraries. This was the opposite of my experience with Clojure... everything just worked! I would love to help others out and get them going in Clojure and would like to know what barriers they've had getting started. I think that if the software doesn't 'just run', than it is not the fault of the people trying to use it. I want to help you get started using Clojure, so I want to know: What barriers prevented you from using Clojure?

I did a long phase of Java work and I found Clojure attractive. It worked pretty well for me.

I was thinking of doing more Clojure then I started getting a lot of client work in Python and I found that Python is a pretty good language with strong metaprogramming capabilities.

A long-term project I am working on requires the capabilities of Jupyter, Pandas, matplotlib, statsmodels, scikit-learn, etc. This does not exist in the JVM to the same level of maturity and switching to Python for this part has been a big win. I looked at Jython but found that many of the aforementioned tools involve the use of native code, FFI, Cython, etc. and thus would not be so portable to Jython.

So for me the problem is not that "Clojure sucks" but rather that "Python is competitive with Clojure"

You've hit on a very sore spot for Clojure developers. From a practical standpoint, there is a lot more work out there for Python programmers than for Clojure programmers. The need for Python developers in the workplace is also more broad, with lots of scientific and machine learning jobs, whereas Clojure work seems to be clustered around web and mobile development. Python is definitely winning the hearts and minds of the more mathematically and scientifically inclined. Thanks for your insight!

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