> The Clojure answer is similar to the python one: use lein. This basically solves all classpath issues.
Most of them. I struggled a lot with the specific case of "I have jogl installed through apt and I want to use it in a Clojure lein setup".
> In the 3 years I used Clojure professionally
That is why I think the issue is underappreciated. Java provides a very comprehensive set of concepts to deal with making Java code run everywhere, and that sort of thing is just baggage when trying to learn a language as an amateur on one system. I expect it becomes a feature when something needs to be done professionally and platform is no longer a given.
> What questions does it raise?
* In a language that requires a lot of probably-new mental models to understand, how much extra burden is created if mistakes are made configuring dependency management?
* Can a novice successfully identify what is going wrong if they muck up their dependencies in a 3rd party tool?
* Will a novice identify that they should be using a 3rd party tool to manage their dependencies, rather than relying on other mechanisms that might be familiar to them?
* Is the hosted nature of Clojure creating interesting new failure modes for novices in the build system as issues might now straddle two languages?
These aren't questions that a professional would encounter, I expect being across complicated build systems is sort of how things are. But the leap from pure Clojure, having fun in the repl, to pure Clojure + a library is a very steep learning curve. The quality of the project setup has to go up a long way. At the moment, based purely on that learning curve, it must be one of the early barriers that causes beginners to drop the language. I'm surprised it doesn't get mentioned in the survey.
Watching Rich's talks, I always got the impression that dependencies in general are an outstanding to-be-thought-about problem.
> Debian doesn't deal gracefully with any external dependency management systems, as far as I know.
External dependency management systems fail to meet Debian user's expectations of quality and stability, tyvm :). Yeah, you're right.