> Of course, to be completely fair about my toolkit, standard Scheme can sometimes lack the heavyweight, “batteries-included” ecosystem required for massive enterprise production compared to the JVM.
I was thinking the whole time, "this person would _love_ Clojure".
I've also worked with CSV (barely) and SVN (more extensively) and I was blown away by Git.
You can have real branches! Many of them! You don't have to manually merge them! It's decentralized, you can have multiple origins, it lets you work offline! The list goes on and on.
There were many compelling reasons to switch to Git. But for all the articles about jj out there, I've never read any compelling reason to switch to jj. "It easier", "the commands are somewhat more ergonomic"... that's all?
First and foremost I was wrong thinking that I was smarter than others — that's not even how intelligence works.
Second I was wrong being so stubbornly pro-tabs / anti-spaces (for example). It doesn't make that much of a difference, so there's no point in being so passionate about it.
And third I was wasting everyone's time (and my persuasion powers) by not choosing my battles more wisely.
My suggestion would be nowadays: let's choose a popular style guide, set up a linter and be done with it.
How is it spreading knowledge around? A lot of times it gives half backed answers and a lot of beginners are using it while learning. That's not a good mix in my opinion.
I've been helping someone who's learning programming and I've had a look at their code. All of it is vibe coded. And the vibes are nightmarish, I don't think the AI is helping at all.
The only thing it's useful for is sparing expert programmers some tedious work, that's my perception as a programmer.
> But UIs are not pure functions, they have a deeply effectful nature, and being reactive all those effects are highly “situated” if you will (to use Rich Hickey’s word).
Oh, but we do this in ClojureScript the whole time.
You can express events and actions in pure functions as data and then take care of the effects outside of the core of your application.
A great example of how to do this is the "re-frame" framework [1] [2]. The documentation is also a joy to read.
> An example of this impedance surfacing in backend programming is a nontrivial map/reduce pipeline. What is the shape of the document at stage six?
There's many ways to find that out in Clojure/Script. There's the built-in `tap>` function [3] which can be used for debugging. You can use that to visualize complex data with Portal. [4]
For example working in west Germany is quite different to working in east Germany. The same goes for north and south Spain, north and south Italy, and so on.
> Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the same problem?
If by that you mean, if you are using Linux in production servers: You may use GPL software in a commercial setting. The source code part only applies if you are distributing software that contains GPL code.
> copy pasting chunks of code from one place to another and then modifying those chunks
That's not how you program. I've never seen anyone programing in this way unless they were just starting.
Edit: if you find yourself copying chunks and modifying them, you probably need to create an abstraction.
Don't mean to be rude, just honestly that is my personal experience.
I was thinking the whole time, "this person would _love_ Clojure".