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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> Elm, Elixir, JavaScript, seem to be better at prioritizing the humanistic aspect. Both in the affordances of the software (Elm’s famous error messages), and in person-to-person interactions.

Can't stress that enough. I have observed Elixir community and I have to say Jose and others did an excellent job fostering a healthy, friendly and warm community. That is such an essential component. That combined with standing on a solid, reliable, battle proven platform (Erlang's BEAM VM) makes for a powerful combination. You see them interact and learn, and ask for help and you think as a new comer "Right on, I want to hang out with these people". Then you run some benchmarks, check out some docs, tutorial and think "Yeah I made the right choice".

So my recommendation if you want to build programming language community - copy what Elixir did and it will be a good start. That means both community, outreach, documentation as well a technical foundation.

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I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?

He gave the Simplicity Matters talks at Railsconf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0) and opened my eyes to a lot of important issues. He's accessible yet challenging.

It didn't make me want to do Clojure, but I definitely wanted to fully understand the message.

Rich Hickey is really, really smart and friendly enough, but he doesn't engage with the community nearly as much as Jose Valim or Chris McCord (Elixir and Phoenix devs) do.

Jose and Chris really go above and beyond. Almost every elixir/phoenix question I see on stackoverflow has a really solid response from one of them with not just an answer but often insights into the why something works a specific way as well.

To me the JVM is battle proven unreliable and fidgety to use.

I tried Clojure and literally within the first hour got a super ugly Java stack trace from trying to add two numbers, and that was after already being a bit miffed by JVM startup time (i'm very big on instant unit test feedback). Meh.

The instant feedback you get from Clojure repl driven development is light years ahead of Ruby. Try sticking to Clojure, you'll see the joy of testing. Stack traces are indeed ugly.

In Clojure, you do not need (and should not) restart JVM to run unit tests. You evaluate them (manually or automatically, from the prompt or a file) inside your REPL.

That indeed was a complete turn-off. I had it in five minutes. Also, I'm sort of done with the JVM - it seems to breed large, complex things that are hard to manage. If I want a Lisp, I'll install Emacs and SBCL - there's not much the JVM has to offer that makes it a must-have.

If you attempt to use edit/compile/restart method of development that most languages use, in the words of south park, "You're gonna have a bad time".

Clojure doesn't make it nearly clear enough that development needs to be performed interactively against a running instance of your application, with a REPL integrated into your editor. And yes tests run instantly when doing this.

Anything else is pure pain.

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