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0 pointsinvalidOrTaken6y ago0 comments

Not the grandparent, but I realized the other day that I'm at nine years of clojure, so...

What's made clojure so great, imo, is its unicorn status as a principled-yet-practical language. That "principled" part is not worthless---it means that a lot of great minds are drawn to it. Before react took over the world, clojure folks were already taking steps in that direction.

A lot of other things. The "sequence" as a core abstraction is very powerful. Immutable data structures by default make functional programming perfomant and efficient.

Speaking of data structures, data structure literals have spoiled me for other languages. After Java, especially.

And none of this mentions clojure's lispiness. The ease of metaprogramming has allowed the community to build some of the best tooling out there, between CIDER for emacs, and Figwheel for the browser---oh, did I forget to mention clojurescript? Being able to reuse code on the front and backend is great for web applications.

Clojure isn't "everything." I think I'd still benefit from learning Haskell, APL, and Forth, and I wouldn't mind knowing Ruby and js a bit better. And I'll probably be dragged back to Python and R if I keep doing maths.

But if someone asked me which single language would probably do the most for them professionally, I'd say clojure. It's the language people start startups so they can use it.

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cutler6y ago

I wish the last bit was true. Clojure jobs are very thin on the ground even here in startup London.

amelius6y ago

What is GUI programming like in Clojure? What libraries exist, and what paradigms are used? E.g. is it more like React or is it more like Gtk/Qt?

logicprog6y ago

There's a really good UI framework for Clojure (not ClojureScript) called seesaw. If I recall correctly it was swing, but it's a very nice data focused, functional library. It really works well with the Clojure philosophy and interactive development. It's also VERY complete.

There are downsides, however. The UIs that it creates definitely look like Swing apps. I.e. ugly at least on Linux. Also, the up to date documentation is difficult to find, I'll like to it here when I get home. The GitHub-linked docs work fine, but they do miss a few features.

geokon6y ago

Seesaw/swing are the old stable solution. The latest library is cljfx built on JavaFX. The developer is very responsive and open about it's development

Check out the examples/mini-tutorial: https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx

It's all React-like. You have a state atom and a GUI map data structure (which I think is equivalent to your DOM in React..) and then you hook up events that update the state and blah blah. It's all very clean and easy to read/use. The underlying JavaFX is also great for an OO GUI library so it's not gross to dive into if you need it

serpix6y ago

For frontend Reagent (React but with just Clojure functions and data structures. No classes, no jsx, just one language and immutable data.), and re-frame which does state management and event dispatching better than the competition. Redux is a poor poor imitation.

Sharlin6y ago

For web frontend (ClojureScript) there's reagent and re-frame, the Clojure versions of React and Redux.

6thaccount26y ago

There is a swing example on the getting started page (or there was a few years ago). It was a one liner to have a Swing pop up say "hello world" or something like that. I'm not sure how easy it is to write actual apps that way.

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