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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoy the language and even the look of it, and I have tried several times to use it.

For "simple" scripts or server processes that you might call from cron, it was fine. But for web development, it was always so hard to get up and running - get everything configured and then know how to do things - that I always gave up. The Clojure community really values choosing libraries and tools and seems to echew Rails-like approaches. That's good if you know what you're doing, but it makes the cost of entry really high. And for better or worse, Ruby is a pretty nice language and Rails is pretty easy to get rolling with... so it's very difficult to justify the effort of switching. I want to... I really do. But at this point, unless I work for a shop like TFA, it will just never happen for me.

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I've had some difficulty getting a "basic" web server up and running too. Composing libraries together is a great way to build software, but when you're starting from such a low level with a new language where that kind of development style is the norm, it's a steep initial learning curve.

Have you looked into Luminus? I haven't tried it yet, but it's supposed to be a Rails-like starter kit for web apps: https://luminusweb.com/

I actually did build something basic following the book Web Development With Clojure (https://github.com/jumarko/web-development-with-clojure), but honestly the way the code snippets were presented in the book were sometimes difficult to use if trying to follow along and build it yourself.

I think you could probably get code from different chapters from their git repo, but then you're not doing it yourself - you are instead trying to read diffs to understand what's new and figure out why it has been changed.

My experience has been that there is no complete guide, tutorial, or example that is kept current and provides every detail such that you can follow it and learn. I'm sure with enough concerted effort, one obviously can learn it... but there will be some trial and error and some guesswork. Normally that's fine, but it slows the process compared to other tech stacks and their guides.

The Clojure community is nice and helpful, but they're all busy doing real work (rather than teaching). Even the book I mentioned is not yet complete and has been in progress for over two years I think.

I agree. I love using the language for smaller things, but since I don't use it at my day job it's really hard to get well acquainted with the common tooling/libraries. When I try starting a new project I always end up spending hours just getting my environment in a good state.

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