Clojure

“The features of Clojure I outline in the post directly addressed the failure modes I've experienced using most other languages.”

“you can make changes while your program is running, by changing source code then applying just that function you changed”

“if you're clojure (cough common lisps) or scala (cough OCAML/Haskell) it seems like you're making life hard for no reason”

“Lisp/Clojure repl allowing you to compile tiny parts of your program inside your running program is incredible for your feedback/iteration loop.”

“LLM stops guessing and starts empirically analyzing current state of things and produces working solution faster, costing far less tokens”

“while nil is a perfectly reasonable default 9/10 times that 1/10 happens often enough and causes major problems”

“it shows in the design quality as even now, almost two decades later, the language has changed surprisingly little and is still really good”

“one of Clojure's main strengths for concurrency / parallelism is structural sharing of immutable data across threads”

“it is however quite consistent, clojure uses vector form for most macros that require a "control" form before a "data" form”

“Clojure is about its rigorous and pragmatic "immutability first" paradigm that you simply don't get from other PLs.”

“With Clojure, if someone hands you data, you can't possibly break some distant piece of code by updating an object”

“The functional paradigm is a bit uncomfortable at first, but it does make problem solving feel... different.”

“Once you get used to structural editing and repl driven development, it’s really hard to go back to syntactic languages.”

“If there is one thing I love about Clojure and Common Lisp, it’s that you’re not supposed to care about the shape of a complex data”

“If I were picking a single language for general LLM-assisted work, weighted across task types, it would be Clojure”

“Biggest limit I encounter is that Clojure doesn't provide any mean to identify areas in my code that are not pure.”

“Things have surely happened and the language has improved, but would you consider any of this to be innovative?”

“with the nREPL feature and letting the AI Agent jack in, Clojure may actually be the most well positioned language for this use case”

“Clojurians are just made different - they are the kindest, extremely knowledgeable, tolerant and most sincere professionals I have ever met.”

“Lisp/Clojure syntax (s-expressions, code-as-data, functions as first-class values) maps closely to the theoretical foundations of computation”

“While it's amazing once you've learned it, and you're slurp/barfing while making huge structural edits to your code, it's a tall order.”

“It's such an unhealthy attitude to have as a community and it holds it back from actually clearly seeing what the issues are”

“Hot reloading is nothing that requires anything special, so you can redefine a callback or dependency with ease in the repl”

“You can see i never interact with the repl directly, I just send code to it via my editor and get results inline.”

“found it so frustrating because, following the idiomatic style, pathways passed maps around, added keys to maps”

“The very good backwards compatibility is attractive but as the result of the small community, there's also a lot of abandoned packages”

“Seamless REPL integration with the language itself made it easier as most of the tools I needed were pre-existing.”

“That is because Clojure is done, there is hardly anything being done other than probably what matters to NuBank and Datomic mostly.”

“core language is more or less unchanged since introduced, rock solid and decades old projects still run just fine”

“in my experience Clojure has an ecosystem where there it is very easy to transition from exploring/playing with data at the REPL”

“Clojure's data processing abilities, particularly around immutable data, make a compelling case in spite of the syntax”

“adding a functional first approach with emphasis on data structures, where using the right algorithms comes naturally”

“The realization that I can have really good performance in a high-level language like Clojure is revolutionary for me.”

“bottom-up programming in a LISP-like language essentally means extending the langauge in order to solve the problem at hand”

“the core language/libraries are unusually stable and widely used and so feature-complete there's basically no hallucinations”

“multiple inheritance fits the same category and with minimal squinting same features can be found in languages such as Clojure or Elixir”

“Clojure REPL experience is pretty primitive though, you don’t have a step debugger or something like the conditions system”

“The core team has never meaningfully addressed the terrible error messages the language spits out because they are able to decode the problem themselves.”

“Clojure not just for the data structures but also because of the high level functions the standard library ships with”

“Clojure is my default programming language but if I want performance (or static types) I reach for Rust.”