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Ask HN: How is Clojure for DevOps work?

2 points by hiAndrewQuinn ↗ HN
I've always liked Lisps, and I have a good friend in there who is (a) all Lisp all the time and (b) recently moved to DevOps. His move has me pondering whether there's some unknown strength Clojure has in the DevOps arena that I don't know about as an outsider to the JVM ecosystem.

5 comments

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gregjor
I would think the JVM requirement makes it a non-starter. But I could have it all wrong -- when it comes to "devops" no amount of unnecessary complexity and dependencies seem too much for some people.

I use Go and bash scripting.

seancorfield
There's babashka for scripting without the JVM, which I think quite a few Clojurians use for devops-style work.
gregjor
"Devops," or system and infrastructure administration, should have the primary goal of creating reproducible steps to create, maintain, and diagnose servers and other assets. Part of reaching that goal is creating scripts, tools, and documentation that other system admins can quickly figure out and use. Imagine if the "DevOps" person gets run over by a truck.

You don't choose a language you fell in love with or want to learn and wedge it into the problem because you want to. Even if you can use Clojure that doesn't make it a good idea. It has too many dependencies, isn't available out of the box on typical servers, and imposes a severe limit on the people who could take over system/infra admin.

seancorfield
Babashka is a self-contained executable that can run with no dependencies.

I was not commenting on the appropriateness of introducing a scripting language for devops work. I was responding to your incorrect assumption that writing scripts in Clojure would require a JVM.

If a company uses Clojure or ClojureScript already, Babashka is a fairly natural way to support devops for that company.

hiAndrewQuinn
Go + Bash is my goto as well, for "bare metal" DevOps work. That's what I would think too, one of the whole points of the JVM is to skirt that issue. So I was interested to see if I had missed something here.