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This might be what happens when the community seems to follow “composable libraries over frameworks”. You still have to do the composing, and it’s not obvious how to do that.

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This is the one thing I found that prevented me from getting far with Clojure. I love the language and the concepts...but there's no stable well-documented go to tool that I can use to hit the ground running. Instead, I spent so much time looking at blog posts and random videos trying to cobble together some sort of system of various libraries to form the basic functionality of a web framework just to get to a point where I could actually start working on the meat of the application. Luminus is extremely helpful but I'd also end up having to learn about the individual pieces and found it hard to add libraries after I started my project.

The pervasive "compostable library" mindset also completely ignores the other benefits of having a standardized framework such as Rails that people can rally around: 1. Standardized documentation 2. Being able to create community that can provide support when you're having issues 3. Easily google-able solutions to common issues 4. A standard that can be iterated upon. I feel like Clojure libraries do this somewhat already so they can work with each other so what's the harm on standardizing these interfaces?

I reckon nobody opposes your fine idea, simply that when a template is transformed enough to be a useful web app starting point, it's often too opinionated to be generally applicable! But maybe the next time I start a few web apps I will think about how I can keep it a clean template as long as possible -- might go somewhere cool.

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