clojure is everywhere in fintech - nubank, guaranteed rate, kroo bank, griffin, pennymac, two sigma, dividend finance, treasury prime, gravie. Other big areas are healthcare and midmarket adtech. And of course startups outside of SF/NYC with smaller seed rounds looking for tech advantage - midwest USA, Europe/UK, Latin america
The further you get from silicon valley the more clojure you see — anyone with a network at FANG spent the last 10 years trying to break in and get that huge salary, which means conforming to the recruiting process, i.e. spending your time off grinding leetcode instead of learning new PLs
Speaking from past experience at Guaranteed Rate, management (probably not developers) regrets that experiment. They’ve laid off most of the clojure devs I know of there (I’m sure one or two remain for legacy services.)
I interviewed at Two Sigma like 6 years ago and I was interested in doing Clojure professionally so I asked about it and was told that they had stopped all new development in Clojure
Doesn't this ignore the reality on the ground that Clojure is a niche (but wonderful) programming language that offers very few career opportunities? It simply isn't big in any specific domain.
I also don't buy that you see more Clojure the "further you get from silicon valley ..." without some actual (or even anecdotal) data to support that claim.
I'm not saying there are zero instances of Clojure in production systems. But it is hard for me to think that it represents a large number of professional employed software engineers. The 2023 StackOverflow survey show 1.38% out of 67,053 respondents in their "most commonly used programming language" section naming Clojure. That is less than 1,000 developers. The public university I work at graduated 500+ CS undergrads in 2023. I would bet $100 that zero of those got a first job that paid them to write Clojure professionally. I would bet $1000 for less than ten grads. I would bet $50,000 for less than 25.
I'm not trying to be cute but don't you think there are less than 10,000 software engineers in the US (maybe the freaking world) who primarily write Clojure code in their day job?
Because I'm curious, job searches at the company site of your list for 'clojure':
Nubank - enhum resultado com a palavra "clojure" encontrado (no results)
Guaranteed Rate - no results
Kroo Bank careers page - no tech listings currently
Griffin - open listing for software engineer (London or Remote within the UK, Germany, Sweden or Ireland) - description: Our backend stack is Clojure, FoundationDB, Kubernetes and AWS. Our frontend stack is CLJS, Reframe, Reagent, React, Stitches, Storybook, and Playroom.
Pennymac - Sorry, no jobs were found that match your search criteria.
Two Sigma - No jobs found
Dividend Finance - 0 JOBS FOUND
Treasury Prime - There are no current openings. (for software engineers)
Gravie - Lead software engineer position - description: Advanced programming experience in multiple programming languages ( Java, Kotlin, Groovy/Grails, JavaScript/TypeScript or Python) along with Clojure/ClojureScript or another functional programming language
Indeed.com returns 15 jobs posted in the last two weeks (US) for the Clojure keyword. LinkedIn returns 34 job posting in the last month (again, in the US).
I love Clojure - it has always "worked" in my head as a language to solve problems in. I was at the first Clojure/conj. I have deployed production code that I wrote in Clojure. Clojure made me a better developer in other languages.
But in the big picture for professional software engineers, Clojure might as well not exist.
Yeah, pinside is a great resource. Surprisingly, the pinside map was created four years after pinball map (source: wayback machine; disclosure: I'm a pinball map dev).
I was shocked as a non-hockey fan to see an ad of a car driving along the wall during active play. My eyes instinctively moved to the ad away from the puck. It was gross.
As an NBA fan, I hate how ads keep getting crammed into every piece of equipment on the court, the jerseys, etc.
As not a fan of professional sports, every time I see a sports game on TV, I feel like the game itself is secondary. It absolutely feels like an advertising show with the unimportant addition of people playing something.
Which sports, specifically? I watch football and rugby and while both have a lot of advertising (in stadia and on jerseys) TV coverage is still very clearly focussed on the sport itself
Precisely.
I used to be an avid Arsenal fan, but now it seems that I would support "Emirates Fly Better". The fact that it's on every player's shirt one might say that "TV coverage is still very clearly focussed on the shirt itself".
I do enjoy admitting, their website https://www.arsenal.com/ is rather tastefully done (I turned off all extensions to have a good look), though. And 'Visit Rwanda' doesn't seem to such be a bad thing, though I couldn't find an Emirates flight to there.
Shirt sponsors aren't not a particularly new thing, though. But I guess in the past Arsenal in particular had sponsors with slightly less controversial owners - iirc JVC and SEGA/Dreamcast weren't directly involved in any slave labour controversies or human rights abuses like the UAE is :)
And gay rights, which both the UAE and Rwanda (where gay sex is legal now, but just another case where the gov has changed the law to appeal to Western sensibilities but sentiments of the public have no changed) are terrible at.
Over here in Europe that's now business as usual during soccer matches, and also biathlon, where a car follows the athletes on the billboard while they are skiing up a slope. However those are actual physical LED displays, not virtually inserted.
You're getting really unfairly dunked on for a sensible point. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does, and what televised sports unarguably does is relentlessly slather its consumers' eyes with advertisements--and also shows some sportsball every once in a while, between those ads. Saying "I like televised sports but not ads" doesn't make a lot of sense. The entire purpose of televised sports, the only reason for its existence, is to saturate you with ads. People get uncomfortable thinking of themselves as willing projection-screens for ads, and get mad at the messenger.
Humans aren't money-optimizing machines. And we don't watch (or play) sport to watch ads.
Companies can try to optimize for profit, but too much focus on the bottom line corrodes just about anything else the company wants to do in the world. And ultimately, the most profitable companies are usually the ones who make a profit on the road of caring deeply about something else. (Eg, Steve Jobs' - who cared about making great products made Apple into a massively profitable company).
> The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does
A complex system will have a complex mix of goals. Some of those goals will be mutually contradictory. For example, some people in NBA obsessively want to maximise profit, while others are there because they love the game. If you take money out, the NBA dies. But the NBA will also die if nobody loves basketball enough to watch the games!
A healthy complex system will navigate its multiplicity of objectives well. For example, as a human I need food. And I want to get work done today. Maybe I'll take a notebook to the cafe. Or maybe I'll relax at the cafe so I'm fresh when I get back home. I don't let either objective override the other.
The criticism here is that the NBA is letting its objectives simplify. The needs of marketing are overriding the team's choice to have creme colored uniforms. Of course this is worrying to some people.
> "And we don't watch (or play) sport to watch ads."
As long as we're talking about professional sports, players do definitely play them because of the ads. This is what pays pro athletes multimillion dollar salaries in the end - no matter what motivating lies they tell themselves (and get told by others), that is the practical purpose of the show they're putting on. Young athletes go through years of preparation, workouts, and practice with the expectation that some time afterward they'll get recruited to that sport's main league which will pay them enormous amounts of money in order to get out on a field and perform so that they'll attract millions of people to watch ads.
Slash athletes salary 10x and you’ll still have same talented athletes putting in great effort.
Most sportsmen are in it because they love competing and given activity. And lower salaries with less focus on advertising may make the activity itself better.
E.g. cycling where many pro races are shaped to be advertising-friendly first. The rest be damned.
Yep. We do the things we do for lots of reasons. Do I write code for money? A bit, yeah. But I also love it. And I connect to a community through my work, and get esteem from people, and it helps me have an impact in the world. Money is important, but so are all those other things.
And I’m sure athletes are just as complex as I am.
A friend of mine is fond of saying that we have 10 reasons for doing everything we do. We know 5 of those reasons consciously and we’ll only admit 2 reasons out loud.
The purpose of sports is to entertain us. One day someone smarter than me will make a machine learning thing that deletes brands and ads from video in real time. I'm going to enjoy watching them seethe about it, perhaps even more than I enjoy watching stuff.
You can build a super smart AI that can swap it out if you want. Sorry to spoil your perverse enjoyment there, but nobody will care about it. Everybody knows about ad blockers. Advertisers included!
For things like logos on jerseys, it doesn't really matter. It only has to be slightly inconvenient for most people not to want to do it, which is good enough for most advertising purposes. Public places of viewing like sports bars can't do it. Media pics will have that logo. People will even buy the jersey and carry the advertiser's brand around IRL.
So don't do it only because you want to see someone seethe, you'd risk being quite disappointed by their indifference!
Yeah, they're so indifferent to ad blockers that they actively find ways to detect and circumvent them, to the point people have to make ad blocker blocker blockers. Google is so indifferent that they forced everyone to use restrictive new browser extension APIs just to cripple ad blockers.
Oh sorry yeah they definitely care. Not just Google, also publishers like NBA care because it dents their revenue. But even they know installing ad blockers is a reasonable human behavior and spending $ to get around them an accepted cost of doing business.
Would you be amazed if I told you I could connect you with someone right now who would tell you they enjoy tv sports and would like them even better without ads?
That point would be made only if you'd connect the parent poster with someone who is willing and capable to provide TV sports without ads.
The purpose of a system is what it does as a whole, even if (end despite that) one part of the system (e.g. sports viewers) would like that purpose to be different. A system fulfilling that purpose would be enjoyable by many, but it doesn't exist, and ads are a major irreplaceable part of the system that does exist - key parts of which are not only fans and casual viewers but also teams (and their budgets), players (and their salaries), and TV stations.
Ads are an inseparable part of the experience with professional sportsball. You can't have the sport without the ads, so it's like complaining that you like watching NASCAR races in-person from front-row seats, and that you love the gas-guzzling carbureted engines they use, but you don't like all the noise from the engines and tires and wish they were all silent. Sure, you can wish for that, but the laws of physics prevent it. It's the same here; the ads are an inseparable part of the experience.
Basically, yes. You're not going to get all these free services (search, email, etc.) for nothing; the price is the ads. Of course, some of us don't look at ads much, thanks to ad-blocking technologies, but enough people are too lazy or ignorant to do that, so that's how all this stuff is financed.
If we eliminate ads, you can say goodbye to many "free" services people take for granted now, or expect to need to subscribe to them for a monthly fee. Of course, that could work, but it'd be very different than what we're used to I think.
I’m not sure. I pay for YouTube Premium because I watch a lot of content there and hate ads. Presumably, they added that option because there are people who exist who don’t like ads and are willing to support a different model. I even had a paid NHL subscription where commercials didn’t run.
The fact that we are even able to have this very conversation to discuss the pros and cons of ad-supported models seems to point to the fact that someone can like an ad-supported business’ services while not liking ads, and it is not a ridiculous or nonsensical position to hold.
Anyway, it seems we’ve diverged quite a lot from whether or not you can be a fan of watching tv sports and also not like ads.
Your YouTube Premium still isn't going to eliminate ads: surely you're still seeing all the embedded ads that "content creators" add to make more money? You're just cutting out the really annoying randomly-inserted ads from Google/YT.
I think it's the same with pro sports: it's all about profit, so they're going to shove ads in there somehow. Sure, maybe you can buy a subscription and avoid the most annoying ads, but you're not going to escape the embedded ads: sponsor logos, digitally-inserted ads, etc.
If you just want to watch sports without ads, the only way is to watch sports that don't have a profit motive, which excludes professional sports.
If you're curious there are other threads in this topic where people are discussing different (existing) tools for removing sponsors from YouTube videos or podcasts, and using ML to remove digitally inserted ads, for example. I like to stay up on this kind of ad-blocking tech and remove ads from content I like as completely as possible.
Maybe I'm a unicorn here (it would be surprising to me given the number of people working on ad-blocking tech, but who knows) but I truly, sincerely do simultaneously like ad-supported content and do not like the ads, and am happy to pay creators directly through subscriptions and use technology to otherwise get rid of them.
The entire business model of sports entertainment ventures like NBA is built around advertising. Saying I'm a fan of the NBA except for the ads is a bit like saying I'm a big fan of credit cards except for that part where you have to pay the bill.
I personally wouldn’t agree that the only possible reaction to anything ad-supported is to like the ads, or else you are making some kind of logical or category error. The existence of ad blockers on the internet for example seems to indicate that not only do some people quite dislike the ads, they even spend time and energy to actually do something about it.
I don't claim that anyone has to like ads. Only that when someone self-describes as an "NBA fan", that sounds like they're saying they're a fan of the NBA overall. When in the next sentence they complain about ads, it sounds like there's an assumption that the ads are encroaching on the NBA, whereas they're an extremely deliberate action by the NBA.
If someone said, I like watching basketball games but I don't like watching ads, that sounds different to me.
I would understand someone saying they are an NBA fan to mean they are a fan of watching their favorite teams compete in the NBA, not that they are fans of the NBA corporate structure, business model, and/or management team, or that they like every attribute and action of the NBA without hesitation.
I love the way Automat makes me feel every time I look at it. When I first started reading your comment I got defensive. After some thought, of course I agree with you.
I've enjoyed some of your other comments on art. Are there any books that you would recommend to someone who enjoys art but knows little about art history (or art in general)?
Frankly... sorting the wheat from the cruft is a major task as there has been so much written on the subject. I would recommend that art be separately considered with respect to it's history (time/place), aesthetics (it's formal parameters) and process (how it was made).
On the subject of art history, I would recommend any art history book that places art in standard sequential order (i.e. 'canon'). Even a child's primer on the subject would be sufficient. A lot can be learned about art by simply placing it in sequential order. Only then can you see that art grew in response to the time/place of its manufacture. If you need a recommendation, then you could do no worse than 'The Art Book' (Phaidon).
More specifically, art produced pre- and post- 1900 needs different treatment as they are different things.
- For art produced pre 1900, the classic tome is 'The Story of Art' by Ernst Gombrich. He may be a bit sneered at nowadays, but he knew his stuff.
- For art produced post 1900 'The Shock of the New' by Robert Hughes is a great primer. Also 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger is aimed at students and presents high-brow ideas in a very digestible manner.
On the subject of aesthetics, I would recommend 'Toward a Psychology of Art' by Rudolph Arnheim. He may now be considered rather old fashioned but he is one of the few thinkers on art who effectively addressed its formal attributes. He also drew, which is a plus. In the same vein there is Ruskin (Modern Painters) who really understood how an artist thinks, and was no slouch as an artist (draftsman) himself.
On color in art I would recommend Bruse MacEvoy's Handprint website. On the topic of color, he has forgotten more than most people would ever know. In my opinion, he is superior to Goethe and Johannes Itten (both art school favorites but both highly questionable). He does not always organize his thinking as well as might be hoped, but that is the nature of color: pan-dimensional and perverse. Also 'Color space and its divisions' Kuehni, R. G. (2001).
The making of art is a process, yet we only see the finished thing. This is our loss as there is much to be learned by studying this process. On the creative process much has been much written, some of it very high-brow. However, the book I would most highly recommend is rather coffee table: 'Daily Rituals: How Artists Work' by Currey, M. (2013). Nothing gives deeper insight into the mind of a creator than how they timetable their productive life.
Finally, I would recommend that art be experienced 'in situ', in front of the actual artwork. I was speaking to a student a few days ago who claimed to have seen the work of Rothko. Of course they had not, they had only seen photos of it. Nuf said.
I wrote a small web app in Crystal a few years ago. I enjoyed the language and the experience, except for the compile times. Any experiences of folks using the interpreter for speeding up iterative development?
It's not about refactoring for me. It's about trying to grok what the heck some library author or coworker was thinking when they went all Architecture Astronaut with the type system and traits. It reminds me of how people go crazy with OO and end up with delegation spread across several files. I already have to hold the problem in my head. I find that Go takes such a mental load off my shoulders that I find it the easiest to grok other's intentions (including my own several months/years later) in.
It may depend on the problem at hand as well. I never really bought this “each line is easier to comprehend” reasoning, because then ad absurdum we would all be writing assembly.
But sure, one is a low level language which can and thus must care about every little detail, while the other is a managed language. (And honestly, mixing the two as if they share the same niche is very off putting)
Just as parent, my greatest struggle with learning Rust is to open someone else's code and trying to understand what is going on. With C that's a lot easier.
I you were to learn Rust from scratch, what project would you recommend for the "changing and breaking" approach?
I don't know if I use that to learn the language itself, but also, different people have different learning styles. What I personally do to learn new languages is write some sort of program that I know well. So for me, that's text adventure games. When I'm trying to learn a new language, I go and make a very simple one. This helps because you're not learning a new domain and a new language at the same time.
But along the whole "break it" idea... I don't know if you're an IDE person or a text editor die-hard, but I've found that rust-analyzer helps a ton. I'm historically a "vim with no plugins" kind of guy, but I'm using VS: Code with the vim keybindings now, and even if I'm not changing some code and getting feedback from the compiler itself, using rust-analyzer to go "hey what's this type here? Where's it defined, let's go take a look" has helped a ton.
That said, types help and poking around helps, but it's not always a panacea. Today I'm working on fixing something that doesn't quite work, even though yesterday I figured out how to assemble everything I'm supposed to need from this library I'm using. "It compiles it works" is a thing people say, and while I feel that way often, it's not true all of the time, of course.
The parent is using the term pejoratively. In this context, I would describe it as calling someone a poseur of liberal/progressive issues, i.e., someone who cares more about the appearance of supporting progressive issues than actually supporting those underlying issues themselves. It means calling someone dishonest about their outward intent, basically. Personally, I'd prefer that people would just say what they mean rather than relying on slang entangled in the modern culture wars.
I've experienced the same repetitive realizations/ideas. I have kept 3 different files going back 10+ years: did.md which contains notes/thoughts about any interesting events by date, ideas.md which contains business/project ideas, and resolutions-yyyy.md. Whenever I revisit them, I'm always struck by the same thoughts/ideas that come up over and over again. The ideas.md file is the one that cracks me up the most--I have repeating project ideas with the same/similar set of features that occur every few years.
Similar story. Learned Logo at school on a Vic-20. Loved it so much I taught myself Basic at Kmart by grabbing the Basic User's Guide off the shelf and typing stuff into one of the C64s on the display case. It impressed my dad so much he put one on layaway. Been programming ever since.
This sentiment comes up every time people complain about the App Store. If you only want to use Apple's App Store, great--keep using it the same way you've always been using it. Nothing will change for _you_.
> What I don’t get is the angry soap box lectures from the people who disagree.
The failure of people to put themselves in other people's shoes is mind-boggling sometimes. There's a reason why so many people are angry.
While I mostly agree with you, I think there are some reasonable arguments for why allowing alternative app stores could degrade the iOS experience, for example:
- Security, no matter how many warnings you throw up/hoops you make users jump through some number will be convinced to install scammy app stores and apps and then will blame Apple for it. And I imagine the App store has some deep hooks into the rest of iOS which would be difficult to change without opening potential security holes
- Fragmentation, competition is great if it serves the user, but multiple app stores could just mean an explosion of exclusivity arrangements and other user-hostile tactics that companies use to try and gain market share
That concern of Facebook or Google launching their own third party app stores and being successful at it are probably overblown. At the very least, even if they did do that, they would be unlikely to take their apps off of the existing App Store.
The points in that post make sense to me, I'm not too worried about the major players breaking away from the app store (although if it's anything like streaming/TV some may try it). I think the more likely scenario is that some smaller App developers break away from the store for one reason or another, and then users are asked to install yet more app stores/use yet more payment providers when it provides no benefit to them, or risk losing their Apps/data.
For all the problems with Apple's rules I do believe some of them at least prevent some of the shenanigans that go on in other platforms and reduce the cognitive overhead of managing software on user devices (which may partly explain why iOS users are happier to spend more money on their devices/apps)
> I think the more likely scenario is that some smaller App developers break away from the store for one reason or another, and then users are asked to install yet more app stores/use yet more payment providers when it provides no benefit to them, or risk losing their Apps/data.
I think that there would be as much friction against smaller developers doing that, as against the big players. Same headache for users of having to set up and deal with multiple memberships and payment methods would still apply. The smaller indie devs would be disinclined to do that for the most part. What will end up happening is that there might be one or two major alternative app stores at most, and probably well-curated by the most dedicated and motivated of volunteers. On Android, that exists with F-Droid, which is a useful case study of how an independent third party App store for hobbyists can arise. These niches will exist for those who choose to pursue them but users will not be “forced” to go to them as they will not need those stores.
Your point about streaming/TV apps make sense, like the major gaming publishers, they both have unique content that might be the most compelling reason for users to pursue them, and the most motivation to get away from the 30% cut.
> If you only want to use Apple's App Store, great--keep using it the same way you've always been using it. Nothing will change for _you_.
That's not really true. The security implications. The effort of having to fix my mom's phone because she got tricked into sideloading something.
The last day of my dad's life in a hospital bed was interrupted by my mom's malware filled android phone playing voice advertisements for a casino app every 30 minutes. It was from some supposed "emoji pack" she installed online. I got her an iPhone the next week.
Let me have a locked down device. Opening it up will negatively affect the experience of users who want that.
Honest question: what domains?