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>The tooling, documentation, community, and everything else beyond the language often matter as much as the language itself. And for better or worse, you simply

by yladiz 5y ago

>The tooling, documentation, community, and everything else beyond the language often matter as much as the language itself. And for better or worse, you simply have more eyeballs on these things as the language gets more popular. I would argue they matter even more than the language. Community is probably the main important one, but the others you mention are foundational too. For example having good documentation is crucial and is basically the way people get familiar with the language over time. For Clojure specifically, I think the shit documentation is one reason it will continue to grow slowly, because it reflects poorly on the maintainers and shows they don't care about newcomers or people who don't "know it". It's such a poor reflection on the language that the core documentation is so bad that there's the community one that exists purely to show examples and explain things that the terse docs don't.

kbuchanan 5y ago
It's true, the Clojure ecosystem is especially hostile to newcomers—in my view it's the principle reason the language has not grown more quickly. There are community members have made the documentation much more manageable, but beginners are still very much left to their own to discover solutions to pretty common problems. But I disagree that it reflects poorly on the maintainers—rather, I think it illustrates that, for the most part, Clojure was created by experienced language pragmatists, for other experienced pragmatists. Clojure tends to be a refuge from other languages, not something a person is born into. The State of Clojure each year consistently shows how many other languages Clojure users already knew before coming to the language. I appreciate how the maintainers value backwards-compatibility (nothing ever breaks, it only gets better), that they are strongly committed to making the language great in the long run, and are unmoved from the language's founding values. I do hope as a community we can do a better job for newcomers, for all our sakes—new blood brings new perspectives, but it's okay that "growing the community" isn't the Core team's top priority. (But hopefully becomes someone's priority in the community at some point...)
- filoeleven 5y ago
  > I appreciate how the maintainers value backwards-compatibility (nothing ever breaks, it only gets better), that they are strongly committed to making the language great in the long run, and are unmoved from the language's founding values. This shows even in the half-life of the Clojure repo: https://m.imgur.com/a/rH8DC https://m.imgur.com/a/rH8DC That image is 5 years old now, I saw it in the 2016 discussion linked below, but the trajectory is clear especially when compared to the other popular repos analyzed in the post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112449
sokoloff 5y ago
I am teaching myself Clojure now (starting around US Thanksgiving to be ready for some advent-of-code problems in it). I never found the docs lacking. Of course, I was using the community docs without knowing (nor caring) that they were community rather than core team docs. Clojure will grow slowly because it’s different (and “harder” in some ways) from other language platforms. I don’t think many people will be turned off by the fact that excellent docs are at a different URL.

by yladiz 5y ago

kbuchanan 5y ago

It's true, the Clojure ecosystem is especially hostile to newcomers—in my view it's the principle reason the language has not grown more quickly. There are community members have made the documentation much more manageable, but beginners are still very much left to their own to discover solutions to pretty common problems. But I disagree that it reflects poorly on the maintainers—rather, I think it illustrates that, for the most part, Clojure was created by experienced language pragmatists, for other experienced pragmatists. Clojure tends to be a refuge from other languages, not something a person is born into. The State of Clojure each year consistently shows how many other languages Clojure users already knew before coming to the language. I appreciate how the maintainers value backwards-compatibility (nothing ever breaks, it only gets better), that they are strongly committed to making the language great in the long run, and are unmoved from the language's founding values. I do hope as a community we can do a better job for newcomers, for all our sakes—new blood brings new perspectives, but it's okay that "growing the community" isn't the Core team's top priority. (But hopefully becomes someone's priority in the community at some point...)

filoeleven 5y ago
> I appreciate how the maintainers value backwards-compatibility (nothing ever breaks, it only gets better), that they are strongly committed to making the language great in the long run, and are unmoved from the language's founding values. This shows even in the half-life of the Clojure repo: https://m.imgur.com/a/rH8DC https://m.imgur.com/a/rH8DC That image is 5 years old now, I saw it in the 2016 discussion linked below, but the trajectory is clear especially when compared to the other popular repos analyzed in the post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112449

sokoloff 5y ago

I am teaching myself Clojure now (starting around US Thanksgiving to be ready for some advent-of-code problems in it). I never found the docs lacking. Of course, I was using the community docs without knowing (nor caring) that they were community rather than core team docs. Clojure will grow slowly because it’s different (and “harder” in some ways) from other language platforms. I don’t think many people will be turned off by the fact that excellent docs are at a different URL.