Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

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You're both wrong. If it was dynamicism then why are JS, Python, and Ruby so popular? If it's about being functional then why has Scala got more users?

Languages are driven by the platform. There is no Clojure platform that people want to use, so no one uses Clojure.

If a language isn't bound to it's own platform, it can share a platform and displace other tools like python, go, and rust do with C and C++ (docker is go; docker-compose, dnf is python; etc).

Scala has carved out pat of the jvm platform (spark, kafka). Clojure has not.

A common onramp is command line tools, but Hello world in Clojure takes 670ms to run. This is a total non-starter.

    time clj -M hello.clj
    Hello world
    clj -M hello.clj  1.05s user 0.12s system 175% cpu 0.672 total

Without an on-ramp to take over a platform, Clojure will not gain traction. Language quality is not a significant driver in adoption ; that's why shonky R has so many users. They will suffer a great deal to use dataframes and ggplot2.

If Clojure is so great, where are these cathedrals that people have made that should make it a no brainer to pick up Clojure? Around what are we circling the wagons?

Clojure has reached sustainable traction. There are large companies using it. There are shops that work with it exclusively. There's no need to conquer the world ;) If some users are evangelizing too loudly, well, it happens everywhere. You can choose to ignore it. And if you are curious why you can check it out and decide for yourself. No random person on HN can convince you.

>it's about being functional then why has Scala got more users?

Scala world is not that functional if you measure it by real-life usage at least. Most of Scala code I've seen was mostly OOP sprinkled with functional tricks.

Compile that same app with graalvm native and you'll get near instant hello world

If you don't want to have to manually compile your app then you can use https://babashka.org/

How many platforms do you think Clojure has?

> Compile that same app with graalvm native and you'll get near instant hello world

Could you show me how?

Your hello world actually took one second to start, add libraries for a web application and you will be hitting 2-3 minutes of startup time.

That's actually not correct at all. Hello World is slow because you have to start up the JVM. Once it's started it's rather fast. Your web application has the same JVM startup cost but not a lot more than that.

The jvm takes 50 ms to start. That's 620ms unaccounted for in Hello World.

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