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I think it actually is a pretty big problem. "Once you absorb the ideas of Clojure" takes months or years to fully get. Composing libraries yourself, like your
by joshlemer 6mo ago
I think it actually is a pretty big problem. "Once you absorb the ideas of Clojure" takes months or years to fully get. Composing libraries yourself, like your comment says, requires that they are "well-picked". Stitching together separate libraries is really time consuming and a distraction from the project you're trying to build. It also results in pointless thrashing within a team as everyone has become personally invested in their own mosaic of hand-selected libraries for every little thing. By the time a beginner learning Clojure has researched and put together their web stack and got it all hooked up and is ready to start, the Django developer already shipped their project last quarter, iterated on it a few times, and is on to the next thing.
One big library/framework has huge benefits and network effects, from enabling a big 3rd party plugin ecosystem, to a deeper documentation literature (including paid courses, books, and AI). It means that there's less or virtually zero getting up to speed when changing from one project to an other. It means that the upstream framework team takes care of upgrades whereas you have to consider, when a new technology comes up, how to integrate this into your stack. There's a reason that Laravel, Django, Rails, and Spring each have thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of times more websites in production than all of Clojure combined.
At a meta/discourse level, I also find the Clojure community's tendency to constantly deny and downplay any criticism or even just issue that people face to be really frustrating and counter productive.
- midnight_eclair 6mo agoyep, every word.
- jimbokun 6mo agoHave you seen this? https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
- embedding-shape 6mo ago> By the time a beginner learning Clojure has researched and put together their web stack and got it all hooked up and is ready to start, the Django developer already shipped their project last quarter, iterated on it a few times, and is on to the next thing. Yes, but this is intentional. Django developers are optimizing for "easy" which makes it fast to spin up project after project, Clojure developers are optimizing for "simple" which means way longer time to get the project of the ground, to nail all the design before things start to actually be put together, which makes it easier and faster to iterate on the same codebase after years of working on. Ask the Django developer how easy it is for them to add features after a project they've done that approach with for N years, then compare it to a Clojure codebase, and you'll notice the difference. Sure, I guess this is "downplaying" and "denying", personally I see people who disagree with me as people who disagree with me, that's fine, I thought that was why we were sharing our opinions in this forum in the first place. But anyways, if you're very deep into "frameworks are clearly superior in every case", that we disagree probably matters less. Best wishes regardless!
- joshlemer 6mo agoRich's Simple Made Easy talk is really interesting and insightful and I still love it but I think now the distinction is brought out too often almost reflexively, and used as a crutch. Yes "simple" and "easy" are not the same thing, but nor are they opposites. Just because something is "not easy" doesn't mean it's "simple". I think there are lots of well maintained Django projects. In fact, if I do a search on AI and on google for what one web stack probably has the lowest overall total cost of ownership including maintenance years down the line, Django usually is what comes up, without even specifically searching for/mentioning it. > if you're very deep into "frameworks are clearly superior in every case" This is a mischaracterization of what I have said, and is more like the extreme position that Clojure devs seem to take. The original commenter said that Clojure is wonderful, but it's too bad that [for the people who want it,] there isn't the option of a well maintained, all-in-one, batteries included framework. You deny that this is a problem, saying that actually a well-chosen set of libraries are superior (I guess in every case, because if not then it actually would be a problem sometimes).