6 ms·

As a more-or-less neutral observation (I still kind-of like the project): What I find curious - perhaps a sign of these times: After just 2-3 months in developm

by phforms 1mo ago

As a more-or-less neutral observation (I still kind-of like the project): What I find curious - perhaps a sign of these times: After just 2-3 months in development (judging from the repo commits, obviously I have no insight into what came before), the developer already communicates Jolt as a feature-complete, polished (perhaps even mature) Clojure dialect with multiple Jolt-adapted libraries from JVM-Clojure, FFI, Fibers, already with a professional looking and marketing-focussed website, detailled documentation, nREPL support, etc. Things I wouldn’t expect so soon from a language developed (mostly?) by a single person in such an early release stage. I don’t know how to get a feeling about the actual state of projects like this anymore, so I always remain a bit suspicious. In Clojure, there is the (Rich Hickey inspired) design philosophy of “hammock driven development”, where we don’t rush things, let them simmer while lying in the hammock, sleeping on them, taking a walk, etc. Makes me wonder if projects like this are too rushed these days without thinking things through, discussing design decisions and getting ideas from other people, letting them mature over time. This isn’t specifically about Jolt (I don’t know much about it or its creator), it just inspired the thought, especially when comparing it to projects like Jank which has been years in development, with lots of feedback from the community and Clojure core maintainers as input.

davexunit 1mo ago
You're right to be suspicious: it's slop.
- iLemming 1mo ago
  This is such a disingenuous, childish, immature and ignorant take - I can't even remain calm without getting angry. Have you ever, kids, tried building anything useful? Anything practical, anything that actually works, anything beneficent? With or without AI? Well, if you have in fact ever tried, perhaps you'd know that building reasonably complex software remains a difficult, challenging, unappreciated work. With or without the help of any tooling. AI-assistants included. Maybe try building something good first. Earn your right to throw the first stone, come engaged, come prepared, ask questions. What you're doing is a fucking slop. Human slop of ignorance. Worst kind.
  - davexunit 1mo ago
    Okay, I'm gonna go work on something good. Will return with questions.
rahen 1mo ago
Not slop, though. The main developer is Dmitri Sotnikov (yogthos), who's been around in the Clojure scene for a long time and knows what he's doing. However, you're right to point out that the development is moving really fast. I'm building a Clojure compiler for machine learning (https://github.com/sheaf-lang/sheaf https://github.com/sheaf-lang/sheaf), and after 9 months, it's still very far from being production-ready.
- davexunit 1mo ago
  > Not slop, though. What would you call 2k commits in 2 months by a single committer if not slop?
  - rahen 1mo ago
    It definitely is vibe-coded, but yogthos is a competent programmer who has been working on public Clojure projects and repos since 2009, and has maintained a large Clojure framework since well before LLMs were a thing. I don't think "2k commits in 2 months" is enough to dismiss as slop when it's being developed by a competent Clojure dev.
    - YorickPeterse 1mo ago
      Competent or not, slop is still slop. The website in particular uses the exact same copy-paste layout/style produced by LLMs and used by pretty much every slop project out there. One very quick "slop or not?" test is to see if em dashes are used in the source code where they literally never make sense. It's not a great test, but it's one that consistently turns out to be good enough. The results should speak for themselves: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajolt-lang%2Fjolt+%E2%80%94&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajolt-lang%2Fjolt+%E2%80%9...
      - yogthos 1mo ago
        The website layout is the same one I used in projects like Luminus long before LLMs even existed https://luminusweb.com https://luminusweb.com If you have specific comments about the quality of the code then I'd be happy to discuss that. Attacking other people's work because they used tools you don't understand is just toxic trolling. And the fact that you judge code quality by the number of em dashes in the comments really speaks volumes. Maybe spend a bit of time figuring out how to use new tools effectively instead of harping on what other people are doing. It's very telling that whenever somebody starts braying about slop, they never have anything of substance to say. All the noise you add to discussions people are trying to have is the real slop.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
yogthos 1mo ago
The reason it's possible to move fast here is due to the fact that I'm porting an existing language to a new runtime. All the hard work and hammock time has already been spent by the core Clojure team and the community. I'm not aiming to reinvent the wheel here. Furthermore, having worked with Clojure for nearly two decades now, I have a very good idea of what the language does, and what I need to implement on the host platform. Once I had the basics bootstrapped, it was really a matter of getting tests passing, and then getting more and more libraries to run on it which allowed me to exercise their own tests. And that's what really made the whole thing possible. It's sort of the ideal scenario where you have very well specified inputs and outputs, and a ton of existing tests to ensure you are implementing the behaviors correctly. The only other aspect here is performance, and that's addressed by having an extensive benchmark harness which compares with JVM timings. This allows me to see where performance gaps are, and focus on addressing them. I would be careful in extending my experience of being able to port Clojure to Chez Scheme runtime to working with LLMs in general because in most cases you don't have such well defined parameters when you start.
- mark_l_watson 1mo ago
  Great work. It just simply worked for me.
- iainctduncan 1mo ago
  This is the germane point here. I'm not into LLM coding myself, but was talking about just this with my CS PhD supervisor yesterday, and porting language implementations is basically a perfect use case for them. He's been using them for porting examples from one language to another and was saying it was perfect - he already knows what he wants to see, understands both languages, and needs a syntax aware typist, essentially.
- jwr 1mo ago
  This. Good stable foundations allow for quick software development. Even if you use AI for coding, working with Clojure as an experienced developer produces extremely good results quickly because of the great foundations. I love the expression "the hammock time has already been spent": it is actually very accurate and I'm very grateful to the Clojure team and community for spending that time!
whalesalad 1mo ago
Honestly LLM’s really foster hammock driven development.
- yes1would 1mo ago
  It's really unfortunate that Hacker News has become an echo chamber of AI trash, but I suppose that's to be expected from people who have a vested interest in OpenAI and Anthropic, to the detriment of literally the entire world. I'm quite confident that YC is taking deliberate action to portray LLMs as a good thing much like Fox News.
  - iLemming 1mo ago
    LLMs are not only OpenAI and Anthropic. Some of us liberally use local models as well. You can't just portray the entire chunk of innovation as "trash". It's like calling the invention of plastics as such. Even though it has brought tons of problems, there's just no way to uninvent things back into oblivion. It's illogical to ask people to stop talking about plastic, and encourage them to not use any - that's just dumb and pointless and won't make any problems magically disappear. Au contraire - if anything, we should talk about LLMs more and we should find more ways to democratize this technology. Silencing and scolding people won't help fight OpenAI and Anthropic's hegemony.
iLemming 1mo ago
> I don’t know much about it or its creator The guy literally has published book(s) on Clojure - not some random, unknown, AI-wielding teenager from somewhere in Nebraska. I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing. But of course, nothing is wrong with being suspicious about any new projects these days. Overall, I agree with your sentiment here.

by phforms 1mo ago

davexunit 1mo ago

You're right to be suspicious: it's slop.

iLemming 1mo ago
This is such a disingenuous, childish, immature and ignorant take - I can't even remain calm without getting angry. Have you ever, kids, tried building anything useful? Anything practical, anything that actually works, anything beneficent? With or without AI? Well, if you have in fact ever tried, perhaps you'd know that building reasonably complex software remains a difficult, challenging, unappreciated work. With or without the help of any tooling. AI-assistants included. Maybe try building something good first. Earn your right to throw the first stone, come engaged, come prepared, ask questions. What you're doing is a fucking slop. Human slop of ignorance. Worst kind.
- davexunit 1mo ago
  Okay, I'm gonna go work on something good. Will return with questions.

rahen 1mo ago

Not slop, though. The main developer is Dmitri Sotnikov (yogthos), who's been around in the Clojure scene for a long time and knows what he's doing. However, you're right to point out that the development is moving really fast. I'm building a Clojure compiler for machine learning (https://github.com/sheaf-lang/sheaf https://github.com/sheaf-lang/sheaf), and after 9 months, it's still very far from being production-ready.

davexunit 1mo ago
> Not slop, though. What would you call 2k commits in 2 months by a single committer if not slop?
- rahen 1mo ago
  It definitely is vibe-coded, but yogthos is a competent programmer who has been working on public Clojure projects and repos since 2009, and has maintained a large Clojure framework since well before LLMs were a thing. I don't think "2k commits in 2 months" is enough to dismiss as slop when it's being developed by a competent Clojure dev.
  - YorickPeterse 1mo ago
    Competent or not, slop is still slop. The website in particular uses the exact same copy-paste layout/style produced by LLMs and used by pretty much every slop project out there. One very quick "slop or not?" test is to see if em dashes are used in the source code where they literally never make sense. It's not a great test, but it's one that consistently turns out to be good enough. The results should speak for themselves: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajolt-lang%2Fjolt+%E2%80%94&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajolt-lang%2Fjolt+%E2%80%9...
    - yogthos 1mo ago
      The website layout is the same one I used in projects like Luminus long before LLMs even existed https://luminusweb.com https://luminusweb.com If you have specific comments about the quality of the code then I'd be happy to discuss that. Attacking other people's work because they used tools you don't understand is just toxic trolling. And the fact that you judge code quality by the number of em dashes in the comments really speaks volumes. Maybe spend a bit of time figuring out how to use new tools effectively instead of harping on what other people are doing. It's very telling that whenever somebody starts braying about slop, they never have anything of substance to say. All the noise you add to discussions people are trying to have is the real slop.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

yogthos 1mo ago

The reason it's possible to move fast here is due to the fact that I'm porting an existing language to a new runtime. All the hard work and hammock time has already been spent by the core Clojure team and the community. I'm not aiming to reinvent the wheel here. Furthermore, having worked with Clojure for nearly two decades now, I have a very good idea of what the language does, and what I need to implement on the host platform. Once I had the basics bootstrapped, it was really a matter of getting tests passing, and then getting more and more libraries to run on it which allowed me to exercise their own tests. And that's what really made the whole thing possible. It's sort of the ideal scenario where you have very well specified inputs and outputs, and a ton of existing tests to ensure you are implementing the behaviors correctly. The only other aspect here is performance, and that's addressed by having an extensive benchmark harness which compares with JVM timings. This allows me to see where performance gaps are, and focus on addressing them. I would be careful in extending my experience of being able to port Clojure to Chez Scheme runtime to working with LLMs in general because in most cases you don't have such well defined parameters when you start.

mark_l_watson 1mo ago
Great work. It just simply worked for me.
iainctduncan 1mo ago
This is the germane point here. I'm not into LLM coding myself, but was talking about just this with my CS PhD supervisor yesterday, and porting language implementations is basically a perfect use case for them. He's been using them for porting examples from one language to another and was saying it was perfect - he already knows what he wants to see, understands both languages, and needs a syntax aware typist, essentially.
jwr 1mo ago
This. Good stable foundations allow for quick software development. Even if you use AI for coding, working with Clojure as an experienced developer produces extremely good results quickly because of the great foundations. I love the expression "the hammock time has already been spent": it is actually very accurate and I'm very grateful to the Clojure team and community for spending that time!

whalesalad 1mo ago

Honestly LLM’s really foster hammock driven development.

yes1would 1mo ago
It's really unfortunate that Hacker News has become an echo chamber of AI trash, but I suppose that's to be expected from people who have a vested interest in OpenAI and Anthropic, to the detriment of literally the entire world. I'm quite confident that YC is taking deliberate action to portray LLMs as a good thing much like Fox News.
- iLemming 1mo ago
  LLMs are not only OpenAI and Anthropic. Some of us liberally use local models as well. You can't just portray the entire chunk of innovation as "trash". It's like calling the invention of plastics as such. Even though it has brought tons of problems, there's just no way to uninvent things back into oblivion. It's illogical to ask people to stop talking about plastic, and encourage them to not use any - that's just dumb and pointless and won't make any problems magically disappear. Au contraire - if anything, we should talk about LLMs more and we should find more ways to democratize this technology. Silencing and scolding people won't help fight OpenAI and Anthropic's hegemony.

iLemming 1mo ago

> I don’t know much about it or its creator The guy literally has published book(s) on Clojure - not some random, unknown, AI-wielding teenager from somewhere in Nebraska. I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing. But of course, nothing is wrong with being suspicious about any new projects these days. Overall, I agree with your sentiment here.