
Clojure 1.2 RC1 - fogus
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/4ae33f04c842783a
======
sigzero
I have a question on Clojure in general. Is it Lisp people that are flocking
to it or is it trending amongst other developers as well?

~~~
mark_l_watson
I think it is both old-time Lisp'ers and JVM platform programmers looking for
something more agile than Java.

I have been using Clojure for my work for several months and for me some of
the big wins are:

1\. easy to use existing Java libraries

2\. lots of nice language features like destructuring, etc.

3\. nice integration with Java and/or Scala projects with IntelliJ

4\. fairly good runtime performance

And, a few hassles:

1\. error stack traces have relatively little value.

2\. The Clojure team is doing great work, but I still feel that the platform
is not quite there yet compared with Java, Common Lisp, Haskell, etc.

I am in a _patient_ mood in regards to Clojure: I use it for some things now,
and expect my percentage use of Clojure over other languages will steadily
increase over the next few years.

~~~
prototype56
Do you mind telling what are the few things that you used clojure for ?

~~~
mark_l_watson
For my current work task, I am using it for information extraction from
Freebase which requires a lot of JSON manipulation. I was using Ruby but
Clojure use is preferred at CompassLabs (both languages are well suited for
Freebase data hacking).

I mostly use Java for Hadoop machine learning work, but I may transition to
Clojure in the next few weeks (my CTO has suggested this).

Earlier this year, I added Clojure examples to my last book on the Semantic
Web.

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fogus
Changes listed at: <http://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/1.2.x/changes.txt>

Also, the Clojure/core team (and many other helpful cats) are happy to help
(see
[http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/291...](http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/2917a556964dc31f))

------
chime
Anyone on Windows able to build the clojure-contrib.jar? I keep getting errors
and it appears I'm not the only one:
[http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/a09f356be405ca1e/9a4f210da4e9d0bc?show_docid=9a4f210da4e9d0bc)

I wonder where I can get an RC1 build of the contrib jar. If it's a jar file,
I wonder why you're supposed to build it yourself using mvn.

Edit: Don't have to build it. It's included in the zip file on the download
page. The new clojure-contrib-1-2.0.jar is just significantly smaller than the
version 1.1 and older.

Edit2: It appears you can indeed build on Windows if you skip the maven tests:
mvn package -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Whether skipping maven tests is a good/bad thing I don't know.

~~~
stuarthalloway
Make sure you are getting the right repository. Once github began supporting
organizations, we moved things to github.com/clojure (not
github.com/richhickey).

You can get RC1 at the top of the download page
(<http://clojure.org/downloads>). We would love to fix usability problems--let
us know what got in your way of finding it.

~~~
chime
I'm very new to Clojure (just 1-2 weeks) so pardon my ignorance/mistake. I
noticed that the new clojure-contrib.jar was 466KB while the older ones were
over 3MB. So I thought it was either a template or a sample file and tried to
compile it myself on Windows. I got errors similar to the link in my parent
post. But now I just extracted the file and it works.

So what happened that shrunk the contrib-jar that much in this version?

~~~
bitsai
Much functionality was moved from clojure-contrib into new namespaces in
clojure itself; clojure.jar is now bigger by roughly the same amount that
clojure-contrib.jar shrank :)

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dcotter
I'm from a C#/.NET background, but have been incorporating more functional
programming techniques into my programming in the last couple of years. This,
combined with my deepening understanding of the f.p. aspects of JavaScript
(after reading JS: The Good Parts) and an interest in Lisp (after reading On
Lisp by Paul Graham) got me really interested in f.p., and I started picking
up Clojure in my spare time. It struck me as a standardized Lisp with access
to lots of great libraries, which overcomes two of the main previous
disadvantages of Lisp. I'm hoping it becomes more mainstream in the years to
come, as it's a lot of fun to work on, but not something I can make much use
of at work, unfortunately.

