> Smile 3.x Avoided due to licensing<p>> Smile 3.x is GPL-licensed, which poses some potential conflicts for some end users...The community consensus is converging around moving away from Smile due to the GPL-relicensing issue, focusing instead on Tribuo...<p>(tribuo is developed by oracle)<p>It's a really great thing that the java community has a high performance and well accepted (~5x stars than tribuo) ML package that's GPL. CF python where the top two libraries are developed by google and facebook. The GPL protects individual, independent developers.<p>I don't think it's right to recommend that new users move away from the package because of licensing issues; the fact that it's GPL now is a <i>good</i> thing for everyone except corporate users (probably a great part of readers). The people who might have GPL problems already know themselves when they'll have a problem.
Something I really like in the Clojure data science stack that isn't mentioned is Clerk* — an interesting take on notebooks. I think it's a good gateway into Clojure for those coming from a Python or R background.<p>*<a href="https://clerk.vision/" rel="nofollow">https://clerk.vision/</a>
For web server stuff, I still think Clojure is extremely solid. But I’ve come to really prefer Racket for general purpose programming.<p>I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve.<p>Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about it. The design of deps.edn/clojure CLI and the lack of user friendly tooling is forever frustrating. Laziness and its implications being invisibly core to the language is annoying as well.
It’s great to see reports of the excellent work Daniel Slutsky and others are doing to make data science more straightforward for everyone.<p>I'm grateful that I get to benefit from these community efforts.
If Clojure compiled to native code by default, instead of relying on the JVM, it'd be much more attractive to me. I know many people don't care about this...
I remember there used to be so much excitement about Clojure - it certainly was the "tech du jour" for a long while, also on the HN front page. It was the "...in Rust" of its day.<p>But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement?<p>My impression is that Clojure failed to live up to the hype, but has found its niche - but it is a rather small niche. In the end, despite its attempts to differentiate itself from Lisp pitfalls, it has gone the way of all Lisps: it's this cool, intellectually stimulating language that in practice almost nobody uses.<p>Is that view wrong? Please feel free to correct me, and sorry if this post is about Clojure in general and not specifically about its machine learning ecosystem.