I actually quitted a job in 2017 because I was so hyped around my discovery of clojure in 2016 and wanted to write some piece of code that was gonna parse some JS code and spit out some other JS code. (I quitted cuz I never got the project done and my manager was like hey man it's been 5 months do you have any updates and I'm like hey I've been rewriting the same thing over and over again while hopping between 5 different editors and 3 different build tools and to be honest all I've done is learning emacs for the past month).
I don't know if things have improved but back then everything felt either a WIP or obsolete. You wanna use lein to build but apparently that's ancient and you really should be using this other build tool that's not fully integrated with any editor other than emacs and hey while you are at it the Clojure team has released their own dependency management tool and you really should be using that instead. By the way who uses intellij when there is VS Code?
Clojure boasts about it's strong Java interop and ability to use the existing Java ecosystem but it has one of the worst intellij integrations, using a 3rd party plugin that is either broken or not working with your build tooling.
Oh did you say you wanna use Gradle or Maven to build your Clojure stuff? You could actually do it, funny guy.
The language is probably the most practical lisp out there, but it also brings all the artificial lisp superiority syndrome with it (and forces you into submitting the rest of your life to emacs in praise of lisp culture).
You think you'll pick it up quickly and be productive but juggling between learning all the build tooling, the language itself, editing lisp and integrating all those 1-man libraries that are scattered all over github, you end up losing weeks if not months on fixing boilerplate.
I would give it another go but now that I think about debugging a Clojure app in runtime and making sense of a reflection-based, dynamic language on top of JVM, I'm like naaah I already have enough stress-induced grey hairs...
Haskell gives me the pure functional kick that I want, and the rest I can deal with in Kotlin or even Java 11.
I can twist your entire argument around, but honestly, why even bother? You use Java and Kotlin as (good) examples, leaving the fact that these are heavily IDE-centric PLs. And if you haven't noticed, Kotlin actually is a marketing tool, created by an IDE tool-maker, to sell more IDE features. Try writing Java in Vim or Emacs - expect a world of pain. Whereas Clojure with its minimal syntax doesn't have that problem. In my team, we have engineers writing Clojure and Clojurescript in Emacs, Vim, VSCode and IntelliJ, and we don't do that for some hobby projects. I also, personally know people who use Sublime and Atom.
try elixir. It has a lot of the same semantics but the tooling is great and consistent. the libraries are descent and the developer experience is one of the best I've ever used.
You can model a lot of problems similarly to clojure. you get immutable structures, agents and a very freestyle ecosystem for getting things done while havign enough opinions laid down to be able to get started pretty quickly
If you are going to reach for a language that runs on the Erlang VM, and you like Lisp, LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang)[1] is a nice choice. And one of Erlang's creators, Robert Virding, created LFE.
I giggled at this. Regularly, and in this thread, whenever some DSL req or LISP is mentioned you get these holier than thou comments about how LISP is the best thing since sliced tomatoes.. similarly with diehard vim/emacs users.
Also, regularly, on almost every post mentioning Clojure, there's at least one person who comes with some emotionally charged, unsubstantiated anecdotes, ranting about how bad it is.
"I tried looking at Clojure code once, around 2015, and I wish I went blind..."
They can't live knowing that many people enjoy writing Clojure. This dystopian world makes them feel really sad. "These schmucks don't even know how miserable their days are. I need to tell them that they are so damn wrong, and maybe I can heal their heresy and fallacious excitement..."
People get excited about Clojure not because it has a cool logo or because of Rich Hickey's terrific hairstyle. There are many good, objective reasons why they like it and prefer it to other tools. Because of those objective reasons, Clojure is used in big corporations and small startups.
Usually, there's nothing wrong with excitement about a good tool you like. Almost always, everything is wrong with hating a tool and hating people who like it.
I don't know if things have improved but back then everything felt either a WIP or obsolete. You wanna use lein to build but apparently that's ancient and you really should be using this other build tool that's not fully integrated with any editor other than emacs and hey while you are at it the Clojure team has released their own dependency management tool and you really should be using that instead. By the way who uses intellij when there is VS Code?
Clojure boasts about it's strong Java interop and ability to use the existing Java ecosystem but it has one of the worst intellij integrations, using a 3rd party plugin that is either broken or not working with your build tooling.
Oh did you say you wanna use Gradle or Maven to build your Clojure stuff? You could actually do it, funny guy.
The language is probably the most practical lisp out there, but it also brings all the artificial lisp superiority syndrome with it (and forces you into submitting the rest of your life to emacs in praise of lisp culture).
You think you'll pick it up quickly and be productive but juggling between learning all the build tooling, the language itself, editing lisp and integrating all those 1-man libraries that are scattered all over github, you end up losing weeks if not months on fixing boilerplate.
I would give it another go but now that I think about debugging a Clojure app in runtime and making sense of a reflection-based, dynamic language on top of JVM, I'm like naaah I already have enough stress-induced grey hairs...
Haskell gives me the pure functional kick that I want, and the rest I can deal with in Kotlin or even Java 11.