> the opposite of boring

I have to push back on this one, respectfully.

Clojure is easily the most boring, stable language ecosystem I’ve used. The core team is obsessed with the stability of the language, often to the detriment of other language values.

This attitude also exists among library authors to a significant degree. There is a lot of old Clojure code out there that just runs, with no tweaks needed regardless of language version.

Also, you have access to tons of battle tested Java libraries, and the JVM itself is super stable now.

I won’t comment on or argue with your other points, but Clojure has been stable and boring for more than a decade now, in my experience.

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thunky 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What I meant by that is the metaprogramming capabilities that often get cited for allowing devs to create their own domain specific "mini languages". To me that's a "creative" way to write code because the end result could be wildly different depending on who's doing the writing. And creativity invites over-engineering, over-abstraction, and hidden costs. That's what I meant by the "opposite of boring".

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hatefulheart 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I read comments like these in bewilderment.

Have you worked for a company that hasn’t created its own, as you put it “mini language”?

Have you worked for a company that doesn’t indulge in over engineering, over abstraction and hidden cost?

Do you actually do programming for a job at all?

	▲	thunky 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		speaking of bewilderment, i'm not sure at all what you're getting at here. because programmers suck we should make tools that make it easier for them to suck?

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dgb23 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You linked me to this comment from another one and I have to agree with this sentiment.

Creating these mini DSLs is something that requires a lot of thought and good design. There is a danger here as you pointed out sharply.

But I have some caveats and counter examples:

I would say the danger is greater when using macros and far less dangerous when using data DSLs. The Clojure community has been moving towards the latter since a while.

There are some _very good_ examples of (data-) DSLs provided by libraries, such as hiccup (and derived libraries), reitit, malli, honeysql, core match, spec and the datalog flavor of Clojure come to mind immediately (there are more that I forget).

In many cases they can even improve performance, because they can optimize what you put into them behind the scenes.

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michaelsbradley 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In practice, though, most developers don’t do that.

There’s a rule of thumb: write a macro as a last resort.

It’s not hard to stick to it. In general, you can go a long, long way with HOFs, transducers, and standard macros before a hand-rolled macro would serve you better.