Item — HN Reader

I guess we would have to believe your empirical observations and ignore the facts:

- Clojure has been noted as the most payed language in dev surveys of the past few years

- Again, different surveys (e.g.: stackoverflow, state of javascript) shown that Clojurists overall are more experienced devs. This kinda makes sense - usually people try Clojure out of curiosity and not for dogmatic reasons and not for the points in the resume.

- Someone did a data analysis of github repos for bug density and Clojure was at the top. https://dev.to/danlebrero/the-broken-promise-of-static-typin...

However, I can say the similar thing: I have seen many clusterfucks in my career. And the worst of them I've seen in C#. Why C#? I don't know, probably because I was inexperienced, young and stupid, and anything (even slightly outside of norm) could've interpreted by me as a clusterfuck. I have no reasons to go back to C# and re-evaluate my opinions about it, I'm sure part of me will be forever biased about it.

2 comments

Pay for a language doesn't reflect skill, or even implied skill. Its simply a function of demand and supply

At $financial-news company, someone decided that they should re-write a few critical parts of the system in closure, partly due to boredom, partly due incompetence. They swanned off, along with 90% of the other people who knew how to maintain closure.

This left a bunch of junior java devs to maintain a ill thought out ego piece.

This logically meant that said company had to spend a large amount of money of contractors to maintain the system whilst they re-wrote everything in the same language.

> Pay for a language doesn't reflect skill, or even implied skill

In this case it sorta does:

a) Clojure is known for having a bit of learning curve and being a Lisp, it rarely attracts newbie programmers

b) it is famous for its concise syntax and for being able to build and maintain things with smaller teams. ROI of 3 Clojure devs is almost always can be predicted to be much higher than of 6-7 Java/Javascript/Python/ Ruby/etc. teams. Pick a few successful Clojure(script) projects and see how big the teams are, they are usually not that big

c) Flexibility of Lisp lets you bend your code for different paradigms: functional, OOP, logic, relational, CSP, reactive, declarative. In my experience, when most other (practical) language acolytes simply ignore academia Haskellers and Clojurists tend to be genuinely interested in CS papers. I think that is due to their experience - again these languages usually attract more seasoned developers

you don't have to believe a damn thing, it's just my experience.