I remember doing just that - writing some ugly parsing code, thinking that I should be a good team member and add some specs for what I was doing, and when I tried calling conform... Oh, it did the parsing for me!
There is a strong recommendation that high schools and universities handle their education remotely.
This recommendation is followed. The Swedish government cannot order schools to be closed (a law was quickly put in place in the case that this be necessary. I'm not sure that it pertains to universities, though).
Depends on the cheese, and on the usage, really. My mom works at a cheese factory, so I regularly get more cheese than I know what to do with, so most of it ends up in the freezer. Non-aged cheese (not familiar with the English terminology, sorry) is absolutely no problem to freeze in my experience. Aged cheese, at least the ones I eat, crumbles completely after defrosting, absolutely impossible to slice - but I only use aged cheese for pizza and other stuff that goes into the oven, so the fact that it falls apart just by touching it is more of a feature for me - no need to grate it!
That's why I prefer to listen to podcasts when taking walks etc, rather than full-on audiobooks - if my mind wanders and I start thinking about something else, it's not a big deal if I missed an episode of some tech podcast. With an audiobook, I have to try and find where my mind left off! (which is usually a lot more cumbersome than when the same thing happens while eye-reading)
Contra argument: this means podcast too. You need total solitude. Most podcast are useless, the only one I found useful (people in podcast just shit talk unlike audio books or/and crafted essays). Econ talk is great one (was recommended on HN) and every other where the guest is smart
This has been my experience. I managed to switch to working remotely 100% by saying "I need to move to another town, either I start working remotely or I'll need to switch jobs". My boss wanted me to say, but not enough was done (by anyone, me included) to really make it work. I wasn't let go, they were still happy with me, but I decided to leave after about half a year, even though there were definitely aspects of working remotely that I loved.
In my experience (in Sweden), most of those results are "false positives". Companies/recruiters like to look for passionate programmers, so they put smaller languages like Clojure in their ads, even though the job itself has nothing to do with it.
True, except they don't include languages just for being smaller (we don't see Befunge, or Unlambda there), but those associated with smartness, and passion for learning. In context of the discussion (dead/alive state), I wouldn't count this as a bad thing. There's no arguing that finding FP job is hundreds (or thousands, depending on city/country) times harder than OOP job. It doesn't mean all functional langs are dead.
I agree with what you're saying, my post was mainly trying to point out that there might appear to be more Clojure jobs than there actually are. For the past couple of months, I've been looking for Clojure jobs (after my company in one fell swoop decided that Clojure was out, and we were no longer allowed to use it for new projects), and though there are quite a few matches when searching just for "Clojure" on job boards, most of those have nothing to do with Clojure. Out of 50-100 matches, maybe 2-4 of those were actual Clojure jobs. Granted, this is in Stockholm, but the situation was pretty much the same a couple of years ago, and things don't seem to have improved. I love Clojure, it's probably my favorite programming language, but I finally decided on a more normal C#/Java/JS position for my new job.
Well, I have already agreed FP jobs aren't plenty :-) Business executives mostly prefer to stick to beaten paths, and it's understandable. I just don't see a tragedy here. OCaml was born in 1996, if I'm not mistaken, so it's a decade older than Clojure. Despite never reaching the industry mainstream, it never stopped being developed, it is used in real projects, so I guess we can agree it's very much alive. Clojure in my very subjective opinion is doing a bit better than that due to ability to augment software written in Java. So while I don't believe it will conquer the world anytime soon, I also believe it's not going to disappear anytime soon.
>Clojure in my very subjective opinion is doing a bit better than that due to ability to augment software written in Java.
OCaml can embed or be embedded in native applications, but that's not the point.
I think that the main problem with Clojure is the lack of types.
Just look at how much Scala is more popular than Clojure, although it's also a strange functional language derived from OCaml/SML.
There is a common opinion that types are a necessity, even ruby, racket and python are adding them. Clojure people are just trying to substitute types with a runtime evaluated contracts/Hoare triplets, which is not an adequate substitution.
What had kept happening was that services written by my team (mostly doing Clojure for backend development) were taken over by other teams that either weren't interested in learning Clojure, or weren't allowed by management to do Clojure development (for whatever reason), so each time this happened our original service would be rewritten in Java or Node.
...of course, for the other team to be able to do this, they still needed to learn some Clojure in order to understand our code, but even in the cases where they actually liked doing Clojure, they were still forced to do the rewrite. The company was/is expanding very rapidly, so part of me can understand the decision to narrow it down to fewer "allowed" languages, to allow services/responsibilities/teams to move around more freely.
But it was one of the main reasons I decided to leave the company. I had joined after years hoping for Clojure to be my main professional programming language (for a substantial part of my career, at least), and I left a somewhat more bitter developer, but at the same time feeling a bit more free and relaxed - there are sooo many opportunities to pick from, now what I'm a bit more open when it comes to the tech!
RSS is one of the main ways I consume the web (including HN). Been doing it for years and I'm very happy with it. I don't know anything about how it works, but it seems lightweight in that I can keep using it without any problems even now when I'm in China, going through terrible internet connections which prohibits "normal" web usage (in addition to The Firewall, that is).
I would say that one of the main reasons why F# gets comparatively little attention is that, yes, C# is being evolved with a fairly big focus on taking lessons from functional languages. Pattern matching is coming along (though it will probably never be as powerful/expressive as in e.g. F#), C# 8 will have nullable reference types, essentially providing null safety in the same way as Option, immutability is being touted as a Good Thing (I hope record types will be with us soon), etc. As someone who loves functional programming, C# is without a doubt my favorite not-mainly-functional-language (and it's way up there overall).
Compare this with Java and the functional JVM languages, where Java didn't even have lambdas until fairly recently - no wonder a (relatively) large subset of JVM developers focus on Scala and Clojure.
C# 8 will introduce nullable reference types, which will effectively be equivalent to Options. And they are working on pattern matching (some simple, partial implementation is already in place AFAIK), though I don't know what will come of that.
I'd like to point out that the extension method feature of C# is one big reason why I like this whole story much better than the Streams API in Java. There are often methods I wish were part of the IEnumerable interface, and with extension methods, I can add them myself! (if they are not already provided in, say, MoreLinq [1]). Very convenient, and a big boost in productivity.
