The programmers who live in Flatland

In the pro-macro camp, if languages like JS had macros, the language could be kept much simpler, leaving things like pipeline operators, async / await, etc to developers.

In the anti-macro camp, they’re hard to write, reason about, and debug stack traces. They are also tempting to use when you shouldn’t, and I think a lot of software shops would run into trouble with them.

Regarding Clojure, I wouldn’t call Clojure a write-only language, but I did find that my Clojure code was more inscrutable than my code in other languages— roughly as inscrutable as my Haskell code. Something about it makes me want to code-golf my way into tiny little clever solutions.

Also, I’ve been burnt by various pitfalls of dynamically typed languages— upgrading dependencies in large dynamically typed projects, etc. I’ll take static types over macros any time.

Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.

These days, most of my work is in TypeScript, and it’s just fine. Not perfect, but fine. I haven’t missed macros much.

All that said, I do like Clojure. I miss the baked in immutability, the ability to omit commas in arrays / lists / maps / etc, keywords, and the threading macros.

In summary, some of us have given it a shot, and ended up choosing a different path, and that’s ok.

> Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.

Why is that? Never understood the complaint about slow Clojure startup time. Usually the context is either your local development environment, where you start the process once until you're done for the day, or you're deploying on a server and 5 seconds vs 10 seconds doesn't make that big of an impact. Short-lived CLIs aren't really suitable for Clojure in the first place, you'd use something like Babashka for that.

So why is the "slow startup" actually a problem? I don't seem to hit that issue ever myself, wondering what kind of situation people find themselves at where this hurts.

I also understand this is an issue for a lot of people but it’s never been an issue for me! I wouldn’t want it for serverless stuff I guess. But I would never think to do that lol