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And poor tooling support on MS Windows. Leiningen does not even have a proper installer on Windows, last time I checked. Having leiningen not bundled into the

And poor tooling support on MS Windows. Leiningen does not even have a proper installer on Windows, last time I checked. Having leiningen not bundled into the clojure distribution, is in strong contrast to the "batteries included" approach of python. There were also complexities in including local jars into projects, as it required setting up a local maven repository, which is tedious job. Also when exeptions occur clojure does not give an interactive repl like other lisps.

stingraycharles 7y ago
> Having leiningen not bundled into the clojure distribution, is in strong contrast to the "batteries included" approach of python. The problem is that Cognitect (the company behind Clojure) don’t use Leiningen themselves, and instead have released their own tool called deps.edn. This has only fragmented the community even further, making it even more difficult for newcomers, with questionable benefits.
- devin 7y ago
  That’s an exaggeration. You’re not entirely wrong, though. First, it is not called deps.edn, it is called tools.deps. Second, it is without a doubt, 100% untrue that projects that Cognitect employees work on, exclusively use tools.deps. Cognitect has client projects they start from 0, and existing projects they shepherd and grow responsibly. Their first priority is to help their clients succeed in their goals, not change the build tool. I have worked with them, and the attitude was always pragmatic > dogmatic. Where I will agree with you is that some folks in the community took an alpha release of tools.deps and treated it like it was the new lein or boot. It isn’t. It’s different, and as a Clojure programmer of 10+ years I use it in exactly 0 production projects. That said, it improves greatly upon “lein checkouts” by allowing one to refer to git SHAs as versions and do cross-project interactive development.
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    Most of Cognitect's projects use either Maven or tools.deps, though. I don't think I've see any of them use Leiningen, but perhaps you can show an example? Anyway, I'm mostly concerned by the fragmentation of it all. It doesn't help that there are now three (or four if you include maven) package / build tools for Clojure. The community is barely large enough to support a single one.
    - devin 7y ago
      For the most part I’m not sure it matters. What specific problems have you had as a result of fragmentation in clojure project build tools? I don’t much care what the name of the command is: if running it produces an artifact I can depend on and use in my app, then it did the job. Different types of build pipelines have different needs.
      - stingraycharles 7y ago
        For me personally it’s not a problem, but build tooling is a frequent obstacle for newcomers to the language. Fragmentation is the opposite of what we want here.
    - dragandj 7y ago
      Does it matter when all these tools are compatible (on the level of artifacts and distribution repository)?
      - stingraycharles 7y ago
        For the experienced user, it doesn't matter. But for the newcomer, it's one more additional choice to make, and, as the grandparent said, is in sharp contrast to a "batteries included" approach you see in Python. Given that build tooling is one of the more frequent complaints, more fragmentation in this area is undesired.
        dragandj 7y ago
        It's funny that you mentioned Python :) https://wiki.python.org/moin/ConfigurationAndBuildTools https://wiki.python.org/moin/ConfigurationAndBuildTools
  - billfruit 7y ago
    Fundamentally though I thought the language ecosystem needs stability and consistency. Very many of clojure related tutorials, stack overflow answers are outdated. Like I mentioned Windows tooling and distribution seems not get much focus. Emacs, cider, nrepl workflow on Linux is too complex with many moving parts, and very brittle(may be things have improved recently). A major pain point for me specifically is that on an exception you don't get a live repl, you only get the stack trace of a dead program. Even some minor inconsistencies lambda positional argument numbers seem to start from 1, than 0, which is where indexes start in all other cases.
Naomarik 7y ago
WSL2 is great. Recently moved off MacOS to do all my dev work work on Windows.
didibus 7y ago
This is being addressed currently. There is now a bundled into the Clojure distribution package manager called "tools.deps". It currently have alpha support for Windows. They are still ironing out the quirks: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Windows https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind... You no longer need local Maven repo, because tools.deps supports local dependencies, you can basically just depend on local folders. It also can depend on git repos.
- billfruit 7y ago
  Yes, but that again begs the question why these are being addressed such late in the evolution of the language/ecosystem.
  - didibus 7y ago
    That's just a matter of man power. Things take time, this sort of tooling wasn't the priority. The community was able to easily take over that space, and relying on Maven was a great way to start off. If you look at Python, Pip appeared in 2011, where as Python launched in 1991. And if you look at the Python scene, it's pretty messy as well, just read this guide: https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/ https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/ Pip isn't even the recommended one to use anymore, slowly being superseded by Pipenv, yet you also have Poetry and conda and to package things you still need setup tools and you have to use twine to submit wheels to pypi, etc. And I still see a lot of guides telling you to use easyinstall still. In Clojure, you had Maven first as the de facto, then Leiningen became de facto, and now you have an official one with tools.deps as the new de facto.

stingraycharles 7y ago

> Having leiningen not bundled into the clojure distribution, is in strong contrast to the "batteries included" approach of python. The problem is that Cognitect (the company behind Clojure) don’t use Leiningen themselves, and instead have released their own tool called deps.edn. This has only fragmented the community even further, making it even more difficult for newcomers, with questionable benefits.

devin 7y ago
That’s an exaggeration. You’re not entirely wrong, though. First, it is not called deps.edn, it is called tools.deps. Second, it is without a doubt, 100% untrue that projects that Cognitect employees work on, exclusively use tools.deps. Cognitect has client projects they start from 0, and existing projects they shepherd and grow responsibly. Their first priority is to help their clients succeed in their goals, not change the build tool. I have worked with them, and the attitude was always pragmatic > dogmatic. Where I will agree with you is that some folks in the community took an alpha release of tools.deps and treated it like it was the new lein or boot. It isn’t. It’s different, and as a Clojure programmer of 10+ years I use it in exactly 0 production projects. That said, it improves greatly upon “lein checkouts” by allowing one to refer to git SHAs as versions and do cross-project interactive development.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  Most of Cognitect's projects use either Maven or tools.deps, though. I don't think I've see any of them use Leiningen, but perhaps you can show an example? Anyway, I'm mostly concerned by the fragmentation of it all. It doesn't help that there are now three (or four if you include maven) package / build tools for Clojure. The community is barely large enough to support a single one.
  - devin 7y ago
    For the most part I’m not sure it matters. What specific problems have you had as a result of fragmentation in clojure project build tools? I don’t much care what the name of the command is: if running it produces an artifact I can depend on and use in my app, then it did the job. Different types of build pipelines have different needs.
    - stingraycharles 7y ago
      For me personally it’s not a problem, but build tooling is a frequent obstacle for newcomers to the language. Fragmentation is the opposite of what we want here.
  - dragandj 7y ago
    Does it matter when all these tools are compatible (on the level of artifacts and distribution repository)?
    - stingraycharles 7y ago
      For the experienced user, it doesn't matter. But for the newcomer, it's one more additional choice to make, and, as the grandparent said, is in sharp contrast to a "batteries included" approach you see in Python. Given that build tooling is one of the more frequent complaints, more fragmentation in this area is undesired.
      - dragandj 7y ago
        It's funny that you mentioned Python :) https://wiki.python.org/moin/ConfigurationAndBuildTools https://wiki.python.org/moin/ConfigurationAndBuildTools
- billfruit 7y ago
  Fundamentally though I thought the language ecosystem needs stability and consistency. Very many of clojure related tutorials, stack overflow answers are outdated. Like I mentioned Windows tooling and distribution seems not get much focus. Emacs, cider, nrepl workflow on Linux is too complex with many moving parts, and very brittle(may be things have improved recently). A major pain point for me specifically is that on an exception you don't get a live repl, you only get the stack trace of a dead program. Even some minor inconsistencies lambda positional argument numbers seem to start from 1, than 0, which is where indexes start in all other cases.

Naomarik 7y ago

WSL2 is great. Recently moved off MacOS to do all my dev work work on Windows.

didibus 7y ago

This is being addressed currently. There is now a bundled into the Clojure distribution package manager called "tools.deps". It currently have alpha support for Windows. They are still ironing out the quirks: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Windows https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind... You no longer need local Maven repo, because tools.deps supports local dependencies, you can basically just depend on local folders. It also can depend on git repos.

billfruit 7y ago
Yes, but that again begs the question why these are being addressed such late in the evolution of the language/ecosystem.
- didibus 7y ago
  That's just a matter of man power. Things take time, this sort of tooling wasn't the priority. The community was able to easily take over that space, and relying on Maven was a great way to start off. If you look at Python, Pip appeared in 2011, where as Python launched in 1991. And if you look at the Python scene, it's pretty messy as well, just read this guide: https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/ https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/ Pip isn't even the recommended one to use anymore, slowly being superseded by Pipenv, yet you also have Poetry and conda and to package things you still need setup tools and you have to use twine to submit wheels to pypi, etc. And I still see a lot of guides telling you to use easyinstall still. In Clojure, you had Maven first as the de facto, then Leiningen became de facto, and now you have an official one with tools.deps as the new de facto.