> Smile 3.x is GPL-licensed, which poses some potential conflicts for some end users...The community consensus is converging around moving away from Smile due to the GPL-relicensing issue, focusing instead on Tribuo...
(tribuo is developed by oracle)
It's a really great thing that the java community has a high performance and well accepted (~5x stars than tribuo) ML package that's GPL. CF python where the top two libraries are developed by google and facebook. The GPL protects individual, independent developers.
I don't think it's right to recommend that new users move away from the package because of licensing issues; the fact that it's GPL now is a good thing for everyone except corporate users (probably a great part of readers). The people who might have GPL problems already know themselves when they'll have a problem.
I was going to chime in to agree but then I saw how this was done - a completely innocuous looking commit:
https://github.com/haifengl/smile/commit/6f22097b233a3436519...
And literally no mention in the release notes:
https://github.com/haifengl/smile/releases/tag/v3.0.0
I think if you are going to change license, especially in a way that makes it less permissive, you need to be super open and clear about both the fact you are doing it and your reasons for that. This is done so silently as to look like it is intentionally trying to mislead and trick people.
So maybe I wouldn't say to move away because of the specific license, but it's legitimate to avoid something when it's so clearly driven by a single entity and that entity acts in a way that isn't trustworthy.
I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve.
Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about it. The design of deps.edn/clojure CLI and the lack of user friendly tooling is forever frustrating. Laziness and its implications being invisibly core to the language is annoying as well.
1) The language evolving all the time is an anti-feature. Clojure is an oasis for the people who are tired of having their knowledge obsoleted by constant change that doesn't really improve anything. People can build whatever weird and wonderful features they want using macros in their own library.
2) deps/edn - the design seems to support toolmakers more than end users. I hated it myself (tinged by poor documentation at the time which has since been remedied). But for anyone else having similar issues; the answer is to jump to leiningen [0] which is by far an easier way to set up a Clojure project.
Deps is ok, but lein is what I'd recommend to anyone as a starting point.
Another thing that's nice with Racket is that it can produce binaries, and while the cross-compile story is kind of messy the language as such is actually, really, multi-platform. Even the GUI-library, which is quite nice, especially with gui-easy additions.
We also have a debugger in Emacs/CIDER.
Your other complaints read like you haven't dug really far, or they are outdated.
;; on Linux and OSX clj -Sforce -Sdeps '{:deps {} :aliases {:dev {:classpath-overrides {org.clojure/clojure nil} :extra-deps {com.github.flow-storm/clojure {:mvn/version "RELEASE"} com.github.flow-storm/flow-storm-dbg {:mvn/version "RELEASE"}} :jvm-opts ["-Dclojure.storm.instrumentEnable=true" "-Dclojure.storm.instrumentOnlyPrefixes=user"]}}}' -A:dev
;; on Windows clj -Sforce -Sdeps '{:deps {} :aliases {:dev {:classpath-overrides {org.clojure/clojure nil} :extra-deps {com.github.flow-storm/clojure {:mvn/version """RELEASE"""} com.github.flow-storm/flow-storm-dbg {:mvn/version """RELEASE"""}} :jvm-opts ["""-Dclojure.storm.instrumentEnable=true""" """-Dclojure.storm.instrumentOnlyPrefixes=user"""]}}}' -A:dev
————
I hate this so much
The “do-it-yourself” mentality that is at the core of Clojure dev culture results in a less rich library ecosystem. Not only you often end up writing custom code for a generic feature, the rest of your team cannot reuse their past experience but has to learn your custom code and maintain it.
If you're familiar with Java, then you can think of Clojure today as going through its Apache Ant phase. Some people love it, some people hate it. I personally want to spend 0% of my time building build tools; thankfully there is a pretty solid build tool that is still maintained and will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
"user friendly tooling" and ANY Scheme in the same sentence?!
I kid, but I always have held that Schemes feel like "tools for building a programming language" (the insanity that is (car ), (cdr ), (caadadr ) suddenly reveals its usefulness when you write an s-expression parser) and Clojure feels like "an actual programming language" with its benevolent use of brackets, build tools, and library ecosystem.
(defn my-func [arg0 arg1] ..) -- Clojure
(define (my-func arg0 arg1) ..) -- Scheme (of which Racket is one)
One thing I've always liked about Racket is its refusal to accept (if )s without else statements, insisting instead on using (when )s.
We do, that is why Cursive exists.
The problem are the folks educated in SBCL + Emacs that never used anything else Lisp related, including the survivors of the Lisp hype wave like Lisp Works and Allegro Common Lisp.
The other issue with debugging is perhaps a "me problem", but it's not uncommon for me to have to re-discover where laziness is present in Clojure's ecosystem while debugging. I don't like laziness being implemented on core functions - I think they should be explicitly named alternate functions. Laziness everywhere + "super stable language" = forever annoying. I guess this is only an issue for others who seldom use Clojure as a hobby language - I'm sure people who use daily are able to cope better.
I'm grateful that I get to benefit from these community efforts.
Eventually ART, although here the process would be more convuluted.
And if one is willing to give away a couple a big piles of money, PTC and Aicas are still in Java town.
But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement?
My impression is that Clojure failed to live up to the hype, but has found its niche - but it is a rather small niche. In the end, despite its attempts to differentiate itself from Lisp pitfalls, it has gone the way of all Lisps: it's this cool, intellectually stimulating language that in practice almost nobody uses.
Is that view wrong? Please feel free to correct me, and sorry if this post is about Clojure in general and not specifically about its machine learning ecosystem.
My last few jobs were in clojure so jobs do exist, moreso than in Common Lisp and Haskell at least (probably). There aren't very many companies that use it relative to the programming world at large, so I'd say you're right on that front.
I'm happy using it and will continue using it. Sometimes I encounter interesting ideas and libraries that I end up using.
At the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write interesting things on uninteresting or even subjectively awful languages and boring things on interesting languages.
Here's something I've been working on for the last two weeks: https://keyboards.justbuythisthing.com/. If I didn't tell you I wrote it in clojure, no one would know. It could very well be PHP.
The problem is that an entire ecosystem is more than just a new language. Clojure has some really interesting libraries, but the rest relies on Java. It is a good ecosystem nonetheless. Julia is having the same issue. It has grown a very respectable ecosystem, but it is hard to grow further to catch up with Python in some fronts without massive corporate funding.
It is interesting to note that, at some point circa 2010, it looked like Clojure could revive Lisp-Stat with Incanter. But, eventually, the project declined in popularity and died. Reaching mainstream relies on getting a critical mass of developers at the right time and for the right domain.
I think there was hope that would happen, but Incanter simply didn't have the functionality or documentation needed to become a player in that space in 2010. It was a doomed effort because of the (intentional) difficulty of native interoperability on the JVM. They'd have had to rewrite tens of millions of lines of code to realize their goals.
However to be honest anecdotally I do think even if they aren't going down in user terms, FP languages are losing percentage market share. From my personal experience FP is no longer new; the hype of FP in general has died down. The hype has moved onto other things over the years (e.g. AI, blockchain, bare metal technologies that enable the above, etc etc).
I'm not saying FP doesn't have a lot of value. I enjoy, particularly when the program calls for it, FP languages like F#, Scala, etc. They still offer a lot of value IMO for all the usual spouted reasons.
IMO I just think the hype has moved from technologies that do things better (i.e. more efficient, less error prone, makes my job easier, etc) to technologies that do shiny new things. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them aren't in fact technical but economic and political (e.g. management). Things like less jobs globally in tech (meaning my skills need to have wider reach), demand for specialist roles that aren't as language focused, etc play a part. Mainstream languages taking FP features as well makes the return vs risk of using a FP language even worse of a tradeoff - there's less perceived return for changing stack than before.
The language ecosystem reflects the smaller numbers of contributors.
I would like to learn it and probably would like to work with it. Only downsides I see is reliance on JVM (which is also a strength) and not as good ways of recursion as other Lisps or Schemes (simply call the function, duh, because it just works and doesn't need extra keywords or syntax).
But I liked the talks and that is seems to have the functional datastructured one needs, if one wants to avoid mutation.
The ideas behind Clojure (functional, immutable datastructures, homoiconic syntax, focus on simplicity, JVM interop) still stand strong IMO.
There are still some exciting projects done in Clojure: Electric Clojure and Rama come to mind.
Honest question: what domains?
It also seems Rich Hickey kind of stopped doing interesting talks, and some big bank bought into it and no one really likes banks.