bitsai

Came here to say exactly this. At my current workplace, one of the very first steps in any project that involves both FE and BE work is for FE and BE engineers to get together and design the API. Once that's done, work can proceed on both sides in a largely asynchronous and independent manner. And one of the first things to be implemented on the BE is API endpoints with multiple mocks that can be requested by the FE, so the FE can start integrating with the endpoints as early as possible.

Comment · 11 years ago

Mmm, I've never used Ruby or Rails professionally, so I can't really speak to that. Prior to Clojure, I mostly worked with C++, Java, C#, and Python.

At its core, Clojure is basically just data and functions. Once the switch flipped in my mind, I found that to be simpler and more straight forward than any of the languages I worked with before.

When the majority of your code is side-effect-free, pure functions (and Clojure makes it very easy to structure your code this way), it becomes very easy to reason about. And very easy to test, with minimal ceremony!

P.S. When I was learning Clojure, I kinda devoured all the resources I could find. A couple interesting looks at the language from the perspective of Rubyists:

http://briancarper.net/blog/536/clojure-from-a-ruby-perspect...

http://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2009-clojure-for-ruby-pro...

Comment · 11 years ago

IMHO, absolutely. There are many wins, but the 2 biggest for us have been:

1. Clojure's tools for making abstractions are orders of magnitude better than Java's, so our codebase is significantly smaller and simpler than what it'd look like in Java.

2. Clojure lends itself very well to a REPL-oriented kind of iterative development that speeds up writing and testing code tremendously, compared to the typical Java workflow.

Comment · 11 years ago

I vote that it's worthwhile as well. We've been using Clojure full-time at ReadyForZero for over 3 years now (for web-dev as well as other tasks), and are very happy with our choice.