Having leiningen not bundled into the clojure distribution, is in strong contrast to the "batteries included" approach of python.
There were also complexities in including local jars into projects, as it required setting up a local maven repository, which is tedious job.
Also when exeptions occur clojure does not give an interactive repl like other lisps.
The problem is that Cognitect (the company behind Clojure) don’t use Leiningen themselves, and instead have released their own tool called deps.edn.
This has only fragmented the community even further, making it even more difficult for newcomers, with questionable benefits.
First, it is not called deps.edn, it is called tools.deps.
Second, it is without a doubt, 100% untrue that projects that Cognitect employees work on, exclusively use tools.deps. Cognitect has client projects they start from 0, and existing projects they shepherd and grow responsibly. Their first priority is to help their clients succeed in their goals, not change the build tool. I have worked with them, and the attitude was always pragmatic > dogmatic.
Where I will agree with you is that some folks in the community took an alpha release of tools.deps and treated it like it was the new lein or boot. It isn’t. It’s different, and as a Clojure programmer of 10+ years I use it in exactly 0 production projects. That said, it improves greatly upon “lein checkouts” by allowing one to refer to git SHAs as versions and do cross-project interactive development.
Anyway, I'm mostly concerned by the fragmentation of it all. It doesn't help that there are now three (or four if you include maven) package / build tools for Clojure. The community is barely large enough to support a single one.
If I want to start a Python project, I `pip install -r requirements.txt` and I can start using it. In Clojure, I need to choose which tool I want to use to perform this simple task, in Python this is standardized. Leiningen, Boot, tools.deps and Maven are all candidates to do this.
1) compatible 2) if you're a newcomer, you probably only need a few dependencies, which is configured in the same way as lein's `project.clj`
I mean, I agree that there definitely is a need for better guides for Clojure and defaults, but I don't think that is the reason Clojure is not more popular, and that Python is simpler there. If I encounter Python for the first time, I definitely won't know that I just "pip whatever".
I actually think that Clojure is very popular, given that there is no big Co that pushes it, and that it still doesn't have a widely known killer app. Most other popular(ish) languages are mainly popular due to huge push by a single big corporate sponsor.
Like I mentioned Windows tooling and distribution seems not get much focus.
Emacs, cider, nrepl workflow on Linux is too complex with many moving parts, and very brittle(may be things have improved recently).
A major pain point for me specifically is that on an exception you don't get a live repl, you only get the stack trace of a dead program.
Even some minor inconsistencies lambda positional argument numbers seem to start from 1, than 0, which is where indexes start in all other cases.
It currently have alpha support for Windows. They are still ironing out the quirks: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/clj-on-Wind...
You no longer need local Maven repo, because tools.deps supports local dependencies, you can basically just depend on local folders. It also can depend on git repos.
If you look at Python, Pip appeared in 2011, where as Python launched in 1991. And if you look at the Python scene, it's pretty messy as well, just read this guide: https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/
Pip isn't even the recommended one to use anymore, slowly being superseded by Pipenv, yet you also have Poetry and conda and to package things you still need setup tools and you have to use twine to submit wheels to pypi, etc. And I still see a lot of guides telling you to use easyinstall still.
In Clojure, you had Maven first as the de facto, then Leiningen became de facto, and now you have an official one with tools.deps as the new de facto.