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Comment by arvidkahl | Hacker News Reader

The ruby-like syntax and the VERY open and newbie-friendly community have definitely contributed to this.

I've been to Elixir conferences, and they felt like people were just encouraging each other to build solid software WITH each other. I've not seen this level of camaraderie for other programming language communities.

Elixir devs — and I am super biased here — are a special bunch :)

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That's great to hear! I get the same feeling towards the Clojure community as well, some of the friendliest, smartest and most helpful people hanging out at the Clojure watering holes (in comparison to other languages I've worked with). I also am constantly in awe of the output of the Clojure world. There are like 3 or 4 great podcasts going, so many cool projects being worked on, especially for a community which seems to be sadly so small.

Which podcasts do you recommend?

I like:

Defn: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/defn/

The REPL: https://www.therepl.net/episodes/ (Seems to have gone quiet)

ClojureScript Podcast: https://clojurescriptpodcast.com/

Functional Design in Clojure: https://clojuredesign.club/ (Also seems to have gone quiet since December)

LispCast by Eric Normand: https://lispcast.com/

Cognitect, the company behind Clojure also has their own podcast but I haven't found it to be that interesting most of the time, at least yet: https://www.cognitect.com/cognicast/index.html

Not specifically Clojure-related but has discussed a few times including wit Rich Hickey (as well as other unrelated great conversations!): CaSe https://www.case-podcast.org/

Completely not at all about Clojure but great software podcasts:

Go Time: Even though I hardly ever write Go, I find their conversations to be really great and having lessons beyond Go. It helps that I am interested in the language though: https://changelog.com/gotime

Web Development and Development in general - The Bike Shed: https://www.bikeshed.fm/

Software Engineering Radio: https://www.se-radio.net/

CoRecursive: https://corecursive.com/

Inside Java: https://inside.java/

Thanks!

I’ve listened to some Defn with mixed results. I really liked their interview with Daniel Higginbotham, especially when they argued a bit about what “simple” means.

Even if some of the others have gone quiet, there plenty of backlog to choose interesting episodes from. The Bike Shed also looks right up my alley. They probably should have had some more discussion before choosing that name, though.

Community can definitely play a role though I can't help but think that Phoenix and the proselytizing done by Jose and co are the main factors.

Sure, we have Luminus in the Clojureverse but its just not as easy and straightforward as the Rails-like experience of Phoenix. You don't have Hickey personally responding to comments on HN/Reddit etc.

Hickey is extremely remote from the Clojure community. Most of Cognitect is. Really, only Alex Miller engages on a regular basis. To a lesser extent, Fogus and Ghadi do, too.

The Clojurescript community is friendlier, IMO.

Much to the detriment of the language imo, and he didn't help the feeling when he released 'Open Source is not about you'

I would agree here that the combination of being "closed to collaboration", the slow pace of development lately, and really infrequent communication from the sole owner/leader/BDFL does send a weird vibe and raises some concern regarding what direction the language is going to be going in in the future.

Isn’t one of the beauties of lisp is that you don’t need much from the language creator. It should be far more stable than non-lisp languages, and you can implement most ideas with macros outside of the core language.

You can get a pretty long way but there are still things that need to be improved over time. For example Clojure still 7 years after the java 8 release doesn't have great integration with java 8 functional interfaces, which is a pretty big detriment to java interop. I saw this patch which seems to have been submitted by a community member https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-2637 (not sure if the author is a core contributor or what), but even after month no comment from Rich or anyone else on the team to indicate if this is a good idea, if they'd let it in or what.

One of the big reasons, in my opinion, for Clojure failing to fulfill its potential as a mainstream language. Clojure had SO much going for it then it just flatlined. Sad indeed and very much down to its stewardship.

Maybe not, but I do agree with him, too many people in open source feel entitled to get stuff for free (beer) without contributing, many corporations that leech on open source as well.

For the most part, Clojure is tuned for experienced developers I think. It's kind of an oximoron, but it feels like it was Rich Hickey's goal as well, to not appeal to any of the "easy" and "convenient" and "familiar", but focus entirely in "no bs", "simple" and "very flexible" pieces that never break backwards compatibility, are always open for extension, keep performance in mind, reaches for battle tested hosts when it can, and all that.

There's a big downside to Clojure having the most amount of experienced developers I think in bringing beginners in. You'd think it be the opposite, but beginners are better treated by other passionate smart beginners and people who just got out of being a beginner. As experienced old devs tend to not have the time or patience or not know how to explain things or make it beginner friendly.

Come on, every language community says that about itself. Rust is the latest "amazing" community.

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