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Comment by s_kilk | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I've been doing Clojure (on and off) for about 4-5 years now and the tooling is as bad as it's ever been. Compared to Elixir/Mix it's downright embarrassing.

Incidentally, I've been putting more effort into Elixir/Erlang recently, I honestly see more of a future there (for me) than in Clojure.

Clojure was definitely a mind-expanding language for me though, no regrets learning it.

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I love both languages, but I don't see the tooling in one as vastly superior to the other. Elixir certainly has Clojure completely licked in terms of compile times; also the Mix command-line workflow is just simpler (no messing around with project.clj vs profiles.clj vs ~/.lein/profiles.clj and god knows where else).

On the other hand, Clojure REPL workflow (although some assembly is required) is phenomenal. Clojurescript is a serious option on the client. And for runtime-level tools (profilers etc), you have the whole Java/JVM ecosystem, which is simply bigger, for better or worse, than the Erlang equivalent.

So for my money, it's definitely a two horse race.

i've been fairly happy with Leiningen but have no experience using mix - i'm curious to know what you really liked about mix that leinigen doesn't have.

    $ time lein --help
    ...
    lein --help  2,16s user 0,49s system 141% cpu 1,880 total

    $ time mix help
    ...
    mix help  0,51s user 0,51s system 129% cpu 0,789 total

This difference compounds and it gets rather annoying quite fast.

What are you doing the requires constant relaunches though?

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