Yes definitely agree, I own the Rotring 600 and 800 pencil and they are fantastic, as already said the ballpoint version is dependant on the refill. The construction is sturdy and they feel very robust and heavy.
But... I've recently transitioned to Pilot Capless fountain pen and it's night and day with the write feeling: https://www.pilotpen.eu/our-products/capless/ with ink bottle refill. The nib size is important, I found the medium too large and landed on the fine nib size.
Yes I agree, timbre and clojure.spec are great and I used them a lot, nowadays I move to μ/log and Malli for instance. My comment was to provide some guidance for someone outside of the Clojure community to navigate in the library ecosystem.
I updated my comment to reflect that it's an opinionated take and just that.
Almost as fast as Java, and for performance critic processes 99.9% of the time we bump on infrastructure performance problem BEFORE hitting the wall with Clojure (see https://clojure-goes-fast.com/blog/ for tips and tooling about performance)
> - Hosted on the JVM, so you're going to be dealing with Java eventually
For me it's a major selling point: JVM is battle tested and a wonder of engineering.
The Java ecosystem richness is incredible (see tooling above for monitoring and profiling for an example). And the platform is constantly moving forward (see latest JDK with virtual threads, generational ZGC, etc.). And of course GraalVM... (https://www.graalvm.org)
> - No automatic tail call optimization because of the limitations of the JVM, so it feels like you're writing a mess of macros rather than real functional code
Never have been a problem and I don't see the point with macros, and code we write looks _very_ functional...
The Clojure's approach is to favour libraries over frameworks.
We use Clojure on various style of applications (mainly web and API based), hosted on widespread infrastructure technologies of Cloud Providers (Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, etc.) and it's a breeze: here are our reasons for choosing Clojure https://defsquare.com/blog/why-we-bet-on-clojure
If you want to look at libraries where some people have settled, here are our _opinionated_ takes on libraries that we use on almost every project:
For infrastructure stuff (PostgreSQL, Keycloak, Solr, Kafka, etc.), just wrapping the underlying Java library or driver is often enough, and there are lots of wrappers for easing the integration. And we implement Hexagonal architecture style to put all of that in place.
Don't be afraid a libraries not moving a lot recently, it's a sign that the library is mature and battle-tested.
Clojure is a joy to use every day :)