That said, I don't really have any good use case for it right now, whether at work, or among my side projects.
That said, you do need to actually use the repl and be repling all the time because the startup times suck and the stack traces are gigantic all the time. That's pretty much it for complaints. You would expect things that aren't apparent in 30 minutes looking at the language to come up after an entire year, but nothing so far.
Does it still do that? I remember "better error messages" being a supposedly-coming-soon thing for the couple years I was using it. I eventually got used to it but damn what a hostile experience. In retrospect I'm pretty surprised I stuck with it. For better or worse I don't have that same tolerance & resilience now.
Yeah, with the arrival of clojure.spec, some error messages has indeed gotten easier to both read and parse (for humans and machines alike), although when you use Clojure JVM so still come across the odd huge Java stack-trace (or with ClojureScript, a pretty sizable JavaScript stack-trace).
That said, I’ve actually used Rails and Django in the past and written a small project in Clojure so I can try.
I actually really love Clojure and had really positive experiences wit Django though I’ve come to favor lighter frameworks like Starlette. Programming in Clojure is quite interesting because it’s functional programming so all the information you need to reason about the function is generally passed in as parameters. It made code comparatively easy to reason about simply by reading the code for the specific function. Clojure also has good support for REPL. I don’t have to do a lot of hunting around for “outside” code to understand what’s going on inside a function. This is the polar opposite of Java, especially when dealing with giant frameworks like Spring, where there is a lot of layers being combined just to do one thing. Coding in Java/Spring, Rails, and even Django can feel a lot like dealing with those nesting dolls.
Like the grandparent, I wish to do more with Clojure some day.
i guess i assumed that since this thread was about web frameworks that their large clojure code base was also a web application. though i see that isn't necessarily implied.
[1] https://reagent-project.github.io/
If you care to share, i'd love to learn what you are building with it.
My company is in the smarthome/IOT space and we use React(Native) + Clojure and ClojureScript for all our apps, dashboards, servers, etc.
I have a bit of time now and I am diving in again and am more determined this time!
I got clojurescript going with react native, and having fun so far. If you need inspiration check out Rich Hickleys talks. He keeps me going through the hard times!