Niki Tonsky
The one thing Clojure is really good at is making excuses. Whatever good or great idea you come up with, backwards-compatible, no downsides, doesn’t matter: be sure they will find a reason not to implement it.
Even Java in its stagnation days was moving faster than Clojure :(
https://ask.clojure.org/index.php/8511/add-digit-separators-support-to-number-literals
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette @jack I’d give this argument benefit of a doubt but let’s look at the facts:
1. They change reader all the time (e.g. in 2017, 2018, 2023, 2024)
2. Java and Go have way bigger ecosystems but they managed to pull it off
Besides, this paints rather dim picture: is that it? Will nothing ever change about Clojure? Even in backwards-compatible way?
swannodette
@jack @nikitonsky yeah this. Changing the reader is a hard sync point for tooling and all the actively used dialects.
Jack Rusher
@nikitonsky I’m fairly sympathetic to Alex‘s point about the various third party readers/parsers
Niki Tonsky
@lisyarus unfortunately, that really is Clojure governing style. Never change anything
Nikita Lisitsa
@nikitonsky The "parsers" argument is super weird. Sure, let's never add anything to the language core because *checks notes* someone has already written a parser???
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette I don’t follow. Are you suggesting that languages are easier to change when they have 1000x more users?
swannodette
@nikitonsky @jack 1. no, not in a way that impacts all dialects, 2. do you really believe Clojure has the resources that Java and Go do? Your conclusion has a "sky is falling" rhetorical flavor which is really tiresome for maintainers.
swannodette
@nikitonsky I don't think "resources" is ambiguous here? There are a number people that you know by name that will have to get together and synchronize for a feature of debatable value.
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette Oh, you think implementation is an obstacle? I’m sure I can have patches for all major dialects in a day. It’s really trivial feature, come on
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette also, what do you mean by affecting dialects? E.g. ClojureScript and Babashka would not support it, but Clojure will. What’s the big deal?
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette but if the problem really is just organizing people and voting (or whatever the current process is), then yes, that is the part that pisses me off. Because that process is clearly not working (it’s not producing results, even for simplest matters)
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette Actually, I never heard a complaint from dialect or tool maintainers that Clojure is changing too fast. Are you sure that issue really exists?
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette I don’t follow again. Yes it’s work for maintainers. But they are maintainers because they wanted to help users, no? Should Clojure choose maintainers’ comfort over end users’ comfort?
swannodette
@nikitonsky improving parity is a lot work even if it changes very slowly. A lot of Clojure maintainers do tooling / dialect work as a side project
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette Are you saying you’d rather Clojure never implemented them? (I’m sure you don’t, but that follows from your argument, and I’m trying to point that out)
swannodette
@nikitonsky case in point I've been thinking about and working on porting method values for months mostly for portability - I have tons of notes, many conversations w/ Thomas Heller and @borkdude - on paper it sounds trivial but it never is.
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette it would be a leap if it was the only case, unfortunately that has happened many times more on many other features, so yeah, I lost faith
swannodette
@nikitonsky it doesn't follow from my argument at all! I've not said anything about what should or shouldn't be done, only the costs of doing so. The conclusion that you made seems far bigger of a leap - that the lack of progress on IMO uninteresting reader feature means anything at all about Clojure / dialect / tooling dev
swannodette
@nikitonsky Clojure development is really the same as it was since day one, if Rich doesn't like it, it ain't gonna happen. I can understand how that might be disappointing if you missed that particular memo :)
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette I feel like it had way more momentum ~10 years ago
Niki Tonsky
@borkdude @swannodette @jack I mean, arguing about the feature itself is one thing. But in this particular case Alex acknowledges that feature is good but then finds an excuse not to implement it anyway
(λ. borkdude)
@swannodette @jack @nikitonsky
The same can be said of namespaced maps. A pain to support in tooling like rewrite-clj, etc.
Recently I asked ChatGPT to spit out a benchmark in JS. It had something like:
let iters = 1000_000.
It really confused me when I had to add a zero because the benchmark was too fast. Should I also move the _ because else it would break or is the _ just ignored? Just an example of how such a thing may get in the way.
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette @pmonks It’s more like nobody is getting any features
swannodette
@pmonks @nikitonsky your use of the word "risk" here is classic FUD move right? The "risk" that you don't get some pet feature you want? Please use this word in a way we can agree upon.
pmonks (330ppm)
@swannodette @nikitonsky This risk:
> if Rich doesn't like it, it ain't gonna happen
Dialects aren’t a great answer since they’re basically equivalent to a fork, which fragments both the user and maintainer bases. And “strictly compliant” dialects (like ClojureScript) have the exact same problem @nikitonsky is referring to: slow improvement gated on Rich.
pmonks (330ppm)
@swannodette @nikitonsky This isn’t news to me, fwiw, but I am continually shocked that no one seems to care about the (imo concerning) implications that has for the future of the language. A bus factor of 1 has long been understood to be a huge risk for any kind of software.
swannodette
@pmonks @nikitonsky what real risk? The whole point of open source is to push that down to zero. Do you not think that after 17 years plenty of people know how Clojure works? Given how many people have created high fidelity dialects it's almost an ideal scenario.
swannodette
@nikitonsky @pmonks the graph just shows Rich more or less had a handle on what he wanted from Clojure by 2010, it was obvious back then. There is no news to speak of here?
Niki Tonsky
@swannodette @pmonks so? We can’t be unhappy with something that was obvious to you in 2010?
Niki Tonsky
LOL I was already complaining about it a year ago https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/113465319924368753
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