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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),

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!
  - divs1210 6y ago
    I love Clojure. I also believe that tools.deps is a step in the wrong direction, fragmenting an already small community and forcing all tools to support yet another dependency/build system. Leiningen is super powerful, and it was never made clear what kind of conflicting requirements / philosophy led to the birth of tools.deps etc. In absence of an official answer, the presumed answer is Not Invented Here Syndrome.
    - onetom 6y ago
      > In absence of an official answer, ... Wouldn't you consider this and official answer?: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha#rationale https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha#rationale
      - divs1210 6y ago
        That documentation does not explain what prompted the creation of another tool when leiningen was already (and still is to a large extent) the de-facto deps/build tool.
Royalaid 6y ago
I have posted about this before but Clojure does have tooling problems specifically ergonomics. Look at create-react-app. Two commands and a ton of editor integration across intellij, vscode, vim, etc gives you incredible access to a rich ecosystem and plugs together really nicely with sensible defaults. Clojure has some answers in this space but everything feels bolted on and not nearly as polished. A big part of the problem is the size of the community, there just isn't enough hands to build out the infrastructure that other langs enjoy. I still love Clojure and will continue to use it but in order to do so I have to understand that some simpler things will just be more work.
- james-mcelwain 6y ago
  I'm not super familiar -- what editor integrations does create-react-app provide? It seems like it's just a project template like Luminus for Clojure. Tooling is definitely important, so I don't want to downplay friction here, just curious about what other ecosystems do better.
  - Royalaid 6y ago
    Mostly that there is an interplay between the config that gets spit out by CRA and the editors that consume it, I don't need to give intellij the run config for the 400th time, it's just there by default. I click run and it runs. An exercise for you to try that might illustrate it. Setup create-react-app and get hello world up and running. Now do the same with Clojurescript. That should include a way to hot reload and edit because that is often the next steps. Notice the friction that CLJS still has and the aimlessness of starting from a build script as is suggested on the Clojure site vs getting a functional build in two commands. I don't want to come across as ungrateful for the hard work that David and Alex and the whole team put in, they are the only reason have dev tools that feel comfortable to me and I can't thank them enough for that, but I just want to point out that friction and difficulty and to try and get people who do understand to put themselves in the shoes of developers who don't and to acknowledge that we as a community can aspire to more.
    - 6y ago

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!
- divs1210 6y ago
  I love Clojure. I also believe that tools.deps is a step in the wrong direction, fragmenting an already small community and forcing all tools to support yet another dependency/build system. Leiningen is super powerful, and it was never made clear what kind of conflicting requirements / philosophy led to the birth of tools.deps etc. In absence of an official answer, the presumed answer is Not Invented Here Syndrome.
  - onetom 6y ago
    > In absence of an official answer, ... Wouldn't you consider this and official answer?: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha#rationale https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha#rationale
    - divs1210 6y ago
      That documentation does not explain what prompted the creation of another tool when leiningen was already (and still is to a large extent) the de-facto deps/build tool.

Royalaid 6y ago

I have posted about this before but Clojure does have tooling problems specifically ergonomics. Look at create-react-app. Two commands and a ton of editor integration across intellij, vscode, vim, etc gives you incredible access to a rich ecosystem and plugs together really nicely with sensible defaults. Clojure has some answers in this space but everything feels bolted on and not nearly as polished. A big part of the problem is the size of the community, there just isn't enough hands to build out the infrastructure that other langs enjoy. I still love Clojure and will continue to use it but in order to do so I have to understand that some simpler things will just be more work.

james-mcelwain 6y ago
I'm not super familiar -- what editor integrations does create-react-app provide? It seems like it's just a project template like Luminus for Clojure. Tooling is definitely important, so I don't want to downplay friction here, just curious about what other ecosystems do better.
- Royalaid 6y ago
  Mostly that there is an interplay between the config that gets spit out by CRA and the editors that consume it, I don't need to give intellij the run config for the 400th time, it's just there by default. I click run and it runs. An exercise for you to try that might illustrate it. Setup create-react-app and get hello world up and running. Now do the same with Clojurescript. That should include a way to hot reload and edit because that is often the next steps. Notice the friction that CLJS still has and the aimlessness of starting from a build script as is suggested on the Clojure site vs getting a functional build in two commands. I don't want to come across as ungrateful for the hard work that David and Alex and the whole team put in, they are the only reason have dev tools that feel comfortable to me and I can't thank them enough for that, but I just want to point out that friction and difficulty and to try and get people who do understand to put themselves in the shoes of developers who don't and to acknowledge that we as a community can aspire to more.
  - 6y ago