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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

I moved away from Clojure to Common Lisp. The Clojure culture doesn't take seriously developer experience, good documentation, easy getting started pages etc. Plus you have to deal with the JVM and slow compile cycles.

Compared to that Steel Bank Common Lisp is rock solid and just works. Even the libraries and documentation are fewer but better.

I did learn a lot from watching Rich Hickey's talks so there's that.

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Really? I have the opposite experience. I _want_ to love CL but Clojure wins when it comes to IDE support and libs and documentation.

Maybe it's just me but I find (SB)CL tooling to be very obscure: ASDF, QuickLisp, Roswell etc. My main issue with it is that it's all written in CL itself and doesn't provide handy CLI tools to execute common tasks (compile app, build package, run tests, deploy etc.). Not to mention that documentation is horrendous.

Basically, I want it to have something like Maven/Gradle/Leiningen to manage dependencies, run tasks and so on. Am I missing something?

ros init and ros build should be everything. And emacs for the tooling. Quicklisp for dependency management. Having said that even CL is not perfect. Something like https://fresh.deno.dev/ is so much better when it comes to presentation and ease of use.

Just to leave some hints for people. - If you don't want to deal with the JVM, Clojure also runs on the Web and .NET. - If you develop with the REPL you don't have compile cycles - Or just use Babashka (no compilation needed)

I use CL and am currently learning Clojure. I think there are generally more libraries for Clojure and better communities (in some way). Maybe it's due to the JVM, I dunno.

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