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Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

I really like David Nolen as a conceptual visionary. His work with Om and core.logic is great and has inspired a lot of derivative work. But I would never rely on his libraries in production. It seems like he always gets to 90% before moving on to the next new thing. 90% documentation, 90% cljs->js coverage, 90% tested, 90% issues addressed. I wouldn't touch Om unless I was willing to employ at least one person to work on Om full time.

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Seems like that's as much (or more! esp. with docs) as you can expect from an open source maintainer.

For something to take off, the community has to step up. I get the concern, though. There's a phase where (if you're an early adopter) it seems like "everyone" is interested, but like, 5 people are experts.

I'd say 90% is pretty good for a single person. Open-source requires a community to work.

It is pretty good, but the community never seems to form. Maybe it is just the lisp NIH culture, maybe it is the way the projects are managed, but either way it doesn't make for production-ready software. You have to be able to support it yourself if you want to use it.

Did you know that David wrote all of ClojureScript? https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/graphs/contributors

Umm, taking nothing away from his incredible stewardship and everything, but that's not true. I believe Rich Hickey et al did the first implementation. Not to mention that contributors have added hundreds of commits.

I don't have experience with Om, but another comparable React wrapper in the Clojurescript world is Re-Frame, and it has a top-notch community. The original developers are still active, but there are many new contributors who are adding substantial new features and polish.

It's David Nolen and the way he runs his projects, making people sign Contributor Agreements and such. He wants to remain the BDFL which is fine, his project, but the downside is that people are less enthusiastic to contribute.

As a contributor to some of David's projects, I gotta say, he does a great job of helping you contribute. He walked me through every issue I had until I could make a meaningful contribution. The one thing which makes it hard to contribute, is that he expects very high quality code, which requires time. I think it is a good tradeoff.

Theres a 160 people in the Om slack channel. There's more ways to contribute than sending patches, and theres quite a lot of community effort behind Om Next these days.

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