I noticed the AI pattern on the sunglasses first. I guess all of the source images are AI-generated? In a sense, that makes the result slightly less impressive -- is it going to be as faithful to the original image when the input isn't already a highly likely output for an AI model? Were the input images generated with the same model that's being used to manipulate them?
It doesn't seem to matter: people have posted tons of examples on social media of non-AI base images that it was equally able to hold steady while making edits.
The language itself is still getting updates, a new major release was just dropped a month or two ago.
I do find that for about 5 years things seemed to be slowing down. Though I keep seeing it pop up, and new exciting projects seem to pop up from time to time.
Just today I saw an article about Dyna3, a relational programming language for AI and ML that was implemented on top of Clojure.
I miss the Strange Loop conference. I think a lot of Clojure buzz was generated there. Clojure West and a few others so a decent job, but the quality of the talks at Strange Loop were second to none. Not that it was a Clojure specific conference, but it had that focus on elegance that I don't see very often, and the organizer was a something like the Prince of Clojure, if I recall correctly.
I'm still enjoying the language, and all my projects still build and run just fine.
The major frustration I have with the platform is 3D graphics. That's a JVM issue overall though.
They even invited Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. hos talk is on YouTube and was awesome. His meta-notation is explained more expansively in a paper on his Oracle page.
As others have said, Clojure is still a thing. For anyone catching up with Clojure again after some time: check out Babashka! Think bash scripts, written in Clojure. It's delightful.
I still use it. They finally fixed my biggest complaint about it a year ago, which is that you couldn't use vanilla Clojure lambdas for the Java functional interface, and so you'd have to reify that interface and it was bulky and ugly. Now it works fine so long as the interfaces actually have the @FunctionalInterface attribute.
Not every project uses @FunctionalInterface, but I've been trying to add it to places [1] [2] [3], and now I'm able to use Clojure in a lot more places.
I’d say clojure is very alive and happy. I’m a clojure newb and have been having a super fun time getting into it. Lots of very neat tools are in active development (babashka is the best thing that’s happened to my developer life in a while!!)
The small-medium sized community is actually fantastic for learning. The big names in the community are only a slack away, and everybody is so enthusiastic.
Not surprised as Clojure is boring tech: slowly evolving with a big focus on stability (ie backwards compatibility).
Meanwhile: the core team has been extended the last couple of years. Also this summer NuBank (the company behind Clojure) announced the first 'Clojure Developer Advocate'. Their role will be to "focus on ways to support the existing Clojure community and grow the community through outreach and development."^1
I was asking the same question today after investigating XTDB¹ (a Clojure centric bitemporal DB) and went looking for a batteries included WebAssembly framework like Blazor²
A lot of the Clojure editors I liked that were made specifically for Clojure seemed to have died down too. It's a shame, they were cool and unique.
Between Clojure and Racket, those have always been my two favorite Lisp / Scheme languages. I don't do a lot of Lisp but when I do its either in Clojure (thanks to Lein) or in Racket.
Not the parent poster, but I suspect he's thinking of stuff like Lighttable, or Liquid. Editors that were written in Clojure, or specifically for Clojure, and had cool features that were not available elsewhere at the time. (I'm boring myself, and pretty much only ever used Emacs with Cider)
Correct, there's something I enjoy about editors designed for specific languages in mind, they feel like they're more refined. Like I use the really simple UI that Racket comes with Dr. Racket because it has some unique features, and it just works.
It is, but the community has been shrinking in recent years.
FWIW, Google Trends shows the hype peaking in 2016, but I doubt that reflects usage as much as buzz.
Instead, if you look at the annual State of Clojure survey results, which solicits opinions directly from the community, the number of responders peaked in 2020 at ~2500, and is down to ~1500 for the most recent 2024 survey.
The absolute number of survey respondents is not a good proxy for community size - the survey runs at different times of the year, for different lengths of time, and with different amounts of marketing. The only goal with the survey is to get a representative sample size. We have other sources of data, both public and private, that are better indicators and indicate the community size is likely growing at this time.
Hi Alex, if you have data that supports a positive Clojure growth narrative please publish it so that I and other consultants/influencers can share the good news in support of our shared mission. The perception of the decline of Clojure is becoming a board-level conversation at unicorn/ish size companies that are or were all-on on Clojure.
- 2024 Highlights
- Trends Over Time
- 2024 New Users
- Previous Results
Now... If we are pointing out isolated facts to make an argument, I would caution that survey popularity (sensitive to timing, duration, outreach etc.) is less telling---and less statistically significant---than isolated facts like this:
> Clojure versions
> Clojure 1.12.0 was released in September 2024 and the survey showed rapid uptake, with 58% already using it, and 65% developing or deploying with the prior versions 1.11, and a steep drop-off after that. Clojure’s focus on stability and avoiding breaking changes makes upgrades safe and easy.
> Trends (use at work, hobby, and study have all up-trended)
> Because this survey has been running since 2010 (thanks to Chas Emerick originally!), we have lots of great longitudinal data and it’s interesting to compare some of the answers over time.
> Looking at the question of how Clojure developers use Clojure, we can see this has generally trended more towards using it at work. However, this year we saw an uptick of people using it for hobbies or in their studies:
Everything you quoted is based on percentages of the responders, not absolute numbers. Changing in-group proportions don't say anything about overall usage. E.g., if responder work usage goes up 10%, but 40% fewer people use Clojure, that's still a drop in absolute numbers.
Look for the number of responses, and you can see a decline each year after 2020.
---
It's possible that the survey may not have been advertised as well, but afaik, it's still posted the same way it always was: announcements on Clojurians, Clojureverse, reddit, etc. I haven't heard of any reason that survey numbers would have been artificially depressed for several years running.
People are busy getting stuff done. Many people don't visit forums if they don't have issues, aren't looking for jobs, aren't offering jobs etc.
Yes, doing Clojure is more demanding initially than many other languages where you can basically template/ LLM your way to anything. With Clojure you might find it easier to do bigger and longer term projects that are rather easy to maintain even for a single person or a small team. That of course doesn't cause much buzz, because it's boring in the good sense.
Or, I picked a random, reasonably popular library to check on Clojars: http-kit. The most recent stable release, 2.8.0, which came out last year, has only been downloaded ~600k times. 2.7.0 from 2023 was downloaded ~1.4m times. 2.6.0 from 2022 was dled ~2m times. Ditto for 2.5.3 from 2021.
I would have used Clojure itself, but I can't find maven dl statistics.
The thing is, I've been seeing little pieces of evidence all over that Clojure is waning, and not much that it's genuinely increasing in popularity. Any individual example doesn't weigh that much, true, but everything seems in the same direction.
If people want Clojure to grow, whether because they need job opportunities, a big employee pool, whatever, it starts with a clear assessment of where it's at.
All of those other things you listed, while important, are second and third-order side effects that are harder to control directly.
I need a tool that helps with problem-solving and product development, and works reliably and effectively across a wide range of use cases, from basic mobile apps to high-performance computing.
Clojure delivers that better than any other language or ecosystem that I know of in a uniform, well-designed package, all the way from the core internals of the language to deps.edn.
Note that newer things are always downloaded less because they have been around less time (lots of people continue using old versions).
Maven stats are available to artifact deployers, but they are useless for
estimating users or community size as downloads are largely from CI servers constantly downloading artifacts for testing. Download numbers are large and seesaw erratically. Unique IP counts are a little more stable but also inflated beyond relevance by CI.
I agree with your critiques, but I still don't think it negates the overall picture I see.
When I was a scientist, we were trained to look at the overall body of evidence when trying to assess a claim. Any individual study has flaws, but when we survey the literature as a whole, do we see many studies confirming a finding? Independent studies presumably don't share the same set of flaws (usually), and the more studies demonstrating something, the more likely it is to be true.
And I just haven't heard any counter-evidence. Are job postings increasing or decreasing? What's the change in MAU for Clojurians? Etc.
I looked for job/social media numbers, but it's hard to get those numbers. If you have better data, I'd love to see it.
Deleting your personal data is just an illusion.
Companies just mark your data as "deleted", but keep the data anyway, in the best of cases just for auditing purposes.
You will never, ever, be able to delete your data.
Stop dreaming.
For some reason, I dislike seeing people that walk "funny". I am particularly disgusted by people that walk with their feet facing outward a little too much.
Yeah people are wired to hate other people that fall outside the norm.
It is especially painful when you are neurodivergend and undiagnosed and spent half your life wondering why people just hate you for being you.
Thankfully people can get over it when they make an effort and educate themselves. So it is good that you admit you feel this way. Maybe you can learn to appreciate people being different or at least tolerate them more.
A lot of people will try to bully you over a weird gait and specifically toe walking. Normies can and do judge people based off this shit. They do it all the time.
We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.
The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.
I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for looking like I'm shilling, but the UAE, ironically. They do not mess around with kids, and make sure they're not exposed to whatever issue the parents might be facing. In many cases, the police allow for lenient visitations for the mother and children. These instances are often not portrayed online because 1.) family guys tend to be less involved in open crime whatsoever, 2.) the UAE has a large singles population so whatever instances happen are very rare, and 3.) the surveillance state ensures that the police already know who's at fault and who isn't.
But God forbid if you're ever caught for any crime whatsoever. Or if you're detained for domestic violence. Especially if not in Dubai (which is miles more lenient than other emirates).
Do you have some specific examples? You present it as if it's a bad thing but I can imagine scenarios where it makes perfect sense. As an obvious example the person could be sharing CP on social media.
Germany and the UK seem to be the worst offenders in regards to this, but that may just be selection bias on what gets into English language media. I can pull more articles if you're actually interested.
The Telegraph article does seem a bit ridiculous but the others seem fairly fine to me. One of them wasn't even an arrest, it was just a politician pressing charges which is his right.
I think it's fair to demand that people follow laws on the internet as in person. Germany has laws against supporting nazism and for good reason. I don't give a crap about those people's right to free speech. The laws against insulting politicians seem a bit less reasonable but honestly just don't call people names online. Can't say I'm bothered by these articles.
Most Germans wouldn't be able to recognize Nazism if it was doing the harlem shake on their dining table.
Mention to them that the only way Communism and Nazism differ is Nazism following Engel's nationalist approach to overthrowing capitalism rather than Marx's international one and Nazis having been obsessed with spiritual and Iranian occultism and you're met with blank stares.
Yet those are the fundamentals of Nazism everything else derives from. Including the Holocaust.
Same goes for the understanding of the Nazis "Nationalism". Most Germans just won't believe you when you tell them that it was an absurd use of that term and much more similar to the modern "pro-EU" mindset than the modern understanding of nationalism.
The Germans are propagandized into thinking the definition of Nazis is being called "rightwing" by the media and wanting decentralization of power and cultural homogenity (modern nationalism). Yet the left:
- has already its SA precursors back on the streets (Hammerbande, Antifa, "NGOs")
- is getting rid of free speech to the maximum extent they somehow can pull off within the limits of the law and beyond that through mandatory voluntary industry initiatives (e.g. "Trusted Flaggers")
- are manufacturing external enemies at fault for all wrong (the Russians)
- is spinning up the war machine (massive military spending at 5% of GDP, near limitless commitment to finance the Ukraine war instead of trying to push for peace)
- Are centralizing more and more power in the hands of highly intransparent or even unelected institutions (e.g. EU or international contracts)
And various other stuff. E.g. some of the stuff you can hear on e.g. party congresses of the German "Die Linke".
In England the police arrests you for a tweet under hate speech laws and they threw the post office workers under the bus to protect the politicians and buggy SW of Fujitsu. Not the place where I'd trust the law enforcement at all.
And Japan, while being clean, safe and Kawai, its legal system has like a 90%+ conviction rate, so make of this what you will.
Can they? I've heard of police in Japan pinning murder cases on people they don't like. I believe there has been some reporting on this related to why thy have such high clearance rates. Don't the police in the UK still have a lot of sexual misconduct scandals?
> In the USA? Where you can be sued if someone slips on your sidewalk? Can't you sue the gvmt?
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. Whether your case actually gets heard or not is another consideration. And even if it gets heard, the judge can simply dismiss it for a variety of reasons before proceeding to trial.
Also, state and the federal governments have sovereign immunity and qualified immunity. Basically the government has to allow itself to be sued.
True this doesn't apply to counties or cities, however there is still a much higher bar for tort even for local police. Generally if they are operatikng within the law, like executing a valid search warrant, the standard is much higher than it would be for an average citizen.
You can sue the government, but the grounds for winning are much narrower.
Meerly suffering harm from government action is not sufficient. Having property impounded as part of an investigation, pursuant to a warrant, is likely not actionable, unless there was malice involved. Using slim evidence isn't really actionable.
The government has endless resources; you would go bankrupt unless a law firm saw a huge payout in taking your case. The system is rigged in favor of the government. They could have burned down his house and the neighbor's house, and not been responsible. Land of the free, God Bless America......
Also, there is almost no deterrent effect. The people who authorized or perpetrated the abuse are not punished if you sue and win a settlement. They don't even have to hire and pay the lawyers. The payment comes out everyone's taxes, perhaps with interest if the government has to pay by issuing debt.
When the police abuse their power, it's the community that pays their salaries that feels the pain.
Why would you be able to sue the government for conducting a search authorized by a judge? It's expected that result of some searches is "Oopsie doopsie nothing found".
It’s even worse than that, in the US police have broad latitude to destroy property, kill pets, seize any cash or assets (theoretically related to the crime, but very easy to abuse) and etc. while executing a search, with little to no recourse.
I think it's fair to expect that the authorities must have a very good probable cause to perform a search of your home, and that any search that turned out to be unwarranted results in a big compensation and a public announcement stating that the specific police department and judge violated the right to privacy.
It’s interesting how it’s not turtles all the way down (as I understand it at least). The things you learn of one scale do not completely translate to the next but serve as the “shadow” projected by the next level down the line. And this probably brings up the complexity that lets us exist and perceive. I say probably because who knows what else is going on in the universe.
All this to say who knows if we are ever going to learn the fundamental why if there is one.
Yes, general relativity explains gravity pretty darn well, tying it to the fundamental fabric of causality that makes up the universe. It goes from “it just happens” to “it must happen and there is no other way it could be.”
There is no notion of causality in our laws of physics, and from all we know gravity could certainly be different, or absent. You could have a universe with just the other three forces.
Modern physics says little about causality. The fundamental laws are all field equations. Those set constraints about how the physical state of a system can evolve between two points in time, but there is no notion of causation, only of consistency or (im)possibility.
I think we are talking past each other. Defining how the system evolves is defining how initial conditions must lead to (cause) intermediate and final states. That’s causality in the logical sense.
What I’m talking about is most similar to the “Causal Explanation” section at the end of the article you link.
If that were true we'd have no cybersecurity professionals left.
In my experience, the work is focused on weakening vulnerable areas, auditing, incident response, and similar activities. Good cybersecurity professionals even get to know the business and tailor security to fit. The "one mistake and you're fired" mentality encourages hiding mistakes and suggests poor company culture.
"One mistake can cause a breach" and "we should fire people who make the one mistake" are very different claims. The latter claim was not made.
As with plane crashes and surgical complications, we should take an approach of learning from the mistake, and putting things in place to prevent/mitigate it in the future.
I believe the thread starts with cybersecurity as a job role, although perhaps I misunderstood. In either case, I agree with your learning-based approach. Blameless postmortem and related techniques are really valuable here.
There's a difference between "cybersecurity" meaning the property of having a secure system, and "cybersecurity" as a field of human endeavour.
If your system has lots of vulnerabilities, it's not secure - you don't have cybersecurity. If your system has lots of vulnerabilities, you have a lot of cybersecurity work to do and cybersecurity money to make.
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