7 ms·

I love clojure the language but hate the tooling. Also a lack of documentation was always a problem, especially around clojure script. I also don't like smug

by LandR 6y ago

I love clojure the language but hate the tooling. Also a lack of documentation was always a problem, especially around clojure script. I also don't like smug community. When you say about the lack of documentation and get told that's a good thing, clojure is meant to be hard to learn, it's not for everyone and maybe you just aren't smart enough... Hmmm. That attitude might put people off.

manishsharan 6y ago
I kind of know where you are coming from. 'Back in the day', early Clojure adopters would ask one to read SICP before asking questions. SICP is indeed the best CS book I have read but that attitude was uncalled for. But things have changed. Clojure and Clojurescript community is among the most helpful and Stackoverflow questions are promptly answered. If you take the time , like I did, you will find that Clojurescript has awesome tooling. Go though the tutorial on Figwheel.main (https://figwheel.org/docs/ https://figwheel.org/docs/ ) and then check out re-frame TodoMVC here https://github.com/day8/re-frame/tree/master/examples/todomvc https://github.com/day8/re-frame/tree/master/examples/todomv... or this simpler reframe tutorial from here https://opengisgal.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/re-frame-clojurescript-tutorial-for-beginners/ https://opengisgal.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/re-frame-clojure... . And this here is the Reagent cookbook https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent-cookbook https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent-cookbook . Good Luck!
- fogus 6y ago
  "'Back in the day', early Clojure adopters would ask one to read SICP before asking questions." I was in the Clojure usenet from very early on and do not recall this happening. That's not to say that it never happened but it was certainly not a common response to questions. Instead, I remember early adopters like Chris Houser, Chas Emerick, Phil Hagelberg, and many others taking a lot of time to help people who had questions with the language.
  - onetom 6y ago
    I've also received countless hours of help from @alandipert, @micha and @jumblerg on the Clojurians slack about boot, Hoplon and Hoplon UI. Without them I couldn't have successfully built a 6 ppl Clojure team, who was consistently delivering working software!
james-mcelwain 6y ago
What tooling has given you problems? I think that some tooling assumes familiarity with the Java ecosystem (which is a problem for many things in Clojure land), but otherwise it seems pretty solid to me.
- sansnomme 6y ago
  There isn't enough officially supported first class tooling. Most things that are a given for Rust/JavaScript/Go are community maintained with only one maintainer in Clojure, development is slow and features take a long time to roll out. (Let's not delude ourselves that Webpack level of donations is even possible here) This is a problem with every language that is small but it is particularly problematic with Clojure as it has a commercial company behind it but you get the feeling that they are disinterested in promoting the language and ecosystem beyond selling their database software. Go also espouses "frameworks bad, libraries good" but the biggest difference is that they actually have a strong robust ecosystem of solid libraries while pretty much every Lisp claims to have production-ready libraries but expect you to cobble together the entire kitchen sink from scratch.
  - james-mcelwain 6y ago
    > Go also espouses "frameworks bad, libraries good" but the biggest difference is that they actually have a strong robust ecosystem of solid libraries while pretty much every Lisp claims to have production-ready libraries but expect you to cobble together the entire kitchen sink from scratch. I mean, Java is pretty much the biggest ecosystem there is and it's trivial to use Java libs from Clojure, so I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. The Go ecosystem seems pretty weak outside of the standard library. I'm not an expert, but I was trying to fix something the other week and was shocked by how few packages there were to solve my problem. The main one (which is a dep of things like k8s) is currently unmaintained.
  - puredanger 6y ago
    > development is slow and features take a long time to roll out As Rich has said, Clojure is small and intends to remain so. Clojure has everything you need right now. It doesn't need gobs of new features to be sufficient. Most Clojurists are hard pressed to come up with things they really need in the language itself, so the rate of change in the core language has slowed. (And the rate of change in the tooling and libraries around Clojure gets more attention now.) > they are disinterested in promoting the language and ecosystem beyond selling their database software ... is incorrect. We have every desire to promote Clojure as a language (regardless of Datomic). Could more be done, sure that's always the case. Please help promote Clojure by doing great stuff and telling people about it!
puredanger 6y ago
> When you say about the lack of documentation and get told that's a good thing, clojure is meant to be hard to learn, it's not for everyone and maybe you just aren't smart enough... Clojure is not meant to be hard to learn and you are definitely smart enough. There are many, many learning resources for Clojure in every form and it has one of the most helpful communities I'm aware of on Clojurians slack, etc.
lvh 6y ago
> I also don't like smug community. When you say about the lack of documentation and get told that's a good thing, clojure is meant to be hard to learn, it's not for everyone and maybe you just aren't smart enough... Where did you experience this? That is unacceptable in most of the Clojure communities I know, and the only big one I don't know personally is the subreddit. (I am not suggesting the subreddit is toxic.)
- puredanger 6y ago
  Compared to many other subreddits, the Clojure one is frolicking unicorns and rainbows.
  - macmac 6y ago
    The best thing is that keeping it that way takes a minimum of moderation.
chrisulloa 6y ago
Clojurians slack is honestly one of the most welcoming and understanding programming communities I've had the pleasure of joining. I frequently ask stupid questions and will occasionally have library maintainers take their time to fill my gaps in understanding. The tooling complaint is valid, but it has been getting better every year. There are plenty of good books for Clojure too, like Brave & True that help you understand the documentation.

by LandR 6y ago

manishsharan 6y ago

I kind of know where you are coming from. 'Back in the day', early Clojure adopters would ask one to read SICP before asking questions. SICP is indeed the best CS book I have read but that attitude was uncalled for. But things have changed. Clojure and Clojurescript community is among the most helpful and Stackoverflow questions are promptly answered. If you take the time , like I did, you will find that Clojurescript has awesome tooling. Go though the tutorial on Figwheel.main (https://figwheel.org/docs/ https://figwheel.org/docs/ ) and then check out re-frame TodoMVC here https://github.com/day8/re-frame/tree/master/examples/todomvc https://github.com/day8/re-frame/tree/master/examples/todomv... or this simpler reframe tutorial from here https://opengisgal.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/re-frame-clojurescript-tutorial-for-beginners/ https://opengisgal.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/re-frame-clojure... . And this here is the Reagent cookbook https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent-cookbook https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent-cookbook . Good Luck!

fogus 6y ago
"'Back in the day', early Clojure adopters would ask one to read SICP before asking questions." I was in the Clojure usenet from very early on and do not recall this happening. That's not to say that it never happened but it was certainly not a common response to questions. Instead, I remember early adopters like Chris Houser, Chas Emerick, Phil Hagelberg, and many others taking a lot of time to help people who had questions with the language.
- onetom 6y ago
  I've also received countless hours of help from @alandipert, @micha and @jumblerg on the Clojurians slack about boot, Hoplon and Hoplon UI. Without them I couldn't have successfully built a 6 ppl Clojure team, who was consistently delivering working software!

james-mcelwain 6y ago

What tooling has given you problems? I think that some tooling assumes familiarity with the Java ecosystem (which is a problem for many things in Clojure land), but otherwise it seems pretty solid to me.

sansnomme 6y ago
There isn't enough officially supported first class tooling. Most things that are a given for Rust/JavaScript/Go are community maintained with only one maintainer in Clojure, development is slow and features take a long time to roll out. (Let's not delude ourselves that Webpack level of donations is even possible here) This is a problem with every language that is small but it is particularly problematic with Clojure as it has a commercial company behind it but you get the feeling that they are disinterested in promoting the language and ecosystem beyond selling their database software. Go also espouses "frameworks bad, libraries good" but the biggest difference is that they actually have a strong robust ecosystem of solid libraries while pretty much every Lisp claims to have production-ready libraries but expect you to cobble together the entire kitchen sink from scratch.
- james-mcelwain 6y ago
  > Go also espouses "frameworks bad, libraries good" but the biggest difference is that they actually have a strong robust ecosystem of solid libraries while pretty much every Lisp claims to have production-ready libraries but expect you to cobble together the entire kitchen sink from scratch. I mean, Java is pretty much the biggest ecosystem there is and it's trivial to use Java libs from Clojure, so I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. The Go ecosystem seems pretty weak outside of the standard library. I'm not an expert, but I was trying to fix something the other week and was shocked by how few packages there were to solve my problem. The main one (which is a dep of things like k8s) is currently unmaintained.
- puredanger 6y ago
  > development is slow and features take a long time to roll out As Rich has said, Clojure is small and intends to remain so. Clojure has everything you need right now. It doesn't need gobs of new features to be sufficient. Most Clojurists are hard pressed to come up with things they really need in the language itself, so the rate of change in the core language has slowed. (And the rate of change in the tooling and libraries around Clojure gets more attention now.) > they are disinterested in promoting the language and ecosystem beyond selling their database software ... is incorrect. We have every desire to promote Clojure as a language (regardless of Datomic). Could more be done, sure that's always the case. Please help promote Clojure by doing great stuff and telling people about it!

puredanger 6y ago

> When you say about the lack of documentation and get told that's a good thing, clojure is meant to be hard to learn, it's not for everyone and maybe you just aren't smart enough... Clojure is not meant to be hard to learn and you are definitely smart enough. There are many, many learning resources for Clojure in every form and it has one of the most helpful communities I'm aware of on Clojurians slack, etc.

lvh 6y ago

> I also don't like smug community. When you say about the lack of documentation and get told that's a good thing, clojure is meant to be hard to learn, it's not for everyone and maybe you just aren't smart enough... Where did you experience this? That is unacceptable in most of the Clojure communities I know, and the only big one I don't know personally is the subreddit. (I am not suggesting the subreddit is toxic.)

puredanger 6y ago
Compared to many other subreddits, the Clojure one is frolicking unicorns and rainbows.
- macmac 6y ago
  The best thing is that keeping it that way takes a minimum of moderation.

chrisulloa 6y ago

Clojurians slack is honestly one of the most welcoming and understanding programming communities I've had the pleasure of joining. I frequently ask stupid questions and will occasionally have library maintainers take their time to fill my gaps in understanding. The tooling complaint is valid, but it has been getting better every year. There are plenty of good books for Clojure too, like Brave & True that help you understand the documentation.