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Comments (30)

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  ertucetin
  I’ve built many different kinds of software (backend, frontend, 3D games, cli tools, code editor, and more) with Clojure and have been using it for over a decade now.I can confidently say that, among the list I mentioned, it’s the best for data manipulation/transformation. Thanks to the author for presenting it clearly and showing how the libraries and code look across different languages, all of which do a great job.But Clojure has its own special place (maybe in my heart as well :). I think Clojure should be used more in the data science space. Thanks to the JVM, it can be very performant (I’m looking at you, Python).
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  zmmmmm
  Seems like it's going to be a tough sell to get people to want to write (tc/select-rows ds #(> (% "year") 2008)) instead of filter(ds, year > 2008) They seem to ignore the existance of Spark, so even if you specifically want to use JVM it feels clearer and simpler: ds.filter(r => r.year > 2008)
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  teleforce
  All the comparisons are with scripting and untyped languages perhaps for faster development and more intuitive eco-system to increase developer productivity.In the age of IntelliSense, auto-completion and AI assisted coding, does the choice of scripting and untyped language justifiable for increased in productivity at the expense of safety and reliability?If you're building data system not just for exploratory, surely modern compiled and typed system languages like Rust and D language make more sense for safety and reliability for the end users?Even more so with D language where you can even have scripting capability for exploratory and protyping stage with its built-in REPL facility [1],[2]. This is feasible due to its very fast compile time unlike Rust. It has more intuitive "Phytonic" syntax compared to other typed languages [3]. You can also program with GC on by default if you choose to. Apparently, you can have your cake and eat it too.[1] drepl:https://github.com/dlang-community/drepl[2] Why I use the D programming language for scripting:https://opensource.com/article/21/1/d-scripting[3] All in on DLang: Why I pivoted to D for web, teaching, and graphics in 2025 and beyond! [PDF]https://dconf.org/2025/slides/shah.pdf
• manudaro
  The Clojure tablecloth performance numbers here are pretty surprising, usually see Python/polars dominating these benchmarks. Been running similar transformations on transit data feeds and polars consistently outperforms pandas by 3x-5x on the group-by operations, but hadn't considered Clojure for the pipeline. Anyone actually using tablecloth in production data workflows?
• olivia-banks
  Having "NA" being treated as nil/null/None by default seems like it would cause the Namibia problem!
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  __mharrison__
  Good pandas and polars code should also be written in an immutable way...
• thrawa8387336
  I always wished Incanter took off.
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  soumyaskartha
  Clojure never got the data science crowd even though the language is genuinely good for it. Always felt like a distribution problem more than a technical one.
• QubridAI
  Interesting perspective Clojure’s immutable, functional approach makes data wrangling feel very different from the more imperative style of R and Python.