Comment by distantaidenn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by distantaidenn | Hacker News Reader

I love Clojure (and have touted such in past comments), but it suffers from a glaring problem: every library is half done and/or abandoned. What happens is you end up modifying an existing library to fit your particular problem space. I needed a web framework. None of them just did things in a "simple way". I ended up branching an existing one and have altered it (very heavily) to fit what I need. It's now my go-to for all new projects.

The issue with us Lispers is that we love the language more than we do the tooling. Tooling be damned! So we all end up re-inventing the wheel for the 1000th time. We will never gain wide spread adoption, as such.

With Ruby, I have Rails. With Python: Django. With Clojure...well good luck. Every framework does one thing beautifully correct and about 10 things wrong. But hey, it's up to you to modify the framework! Because that's the Lisp way of doing things!

Maybe I should publish my bespoke framework one of these days...

I think every clojure dev that sticks long enough and feels the need for a framework ends up publishing one. The reason none of them stands out much imo is that library composition is pretty easy to do and the building blocks libraries out there do their thing pretty well. So with a bit of experience even on a new project it feels much easier to adopt your known set of building blocks, maybe throw a few new ones into the mix or replace one and you are good to go. At the end of the day it doesn't take more time than learning a framework yet it gives you a lot more flexibility.

One thing I learned from Clojure is that you really don't need a lot of libraries to get work done.

Edit: if you're going to downvote this comment, I challenge you to also reply with how many years of professional Clojure experience you have.

Every early ecosystem suffers from lack of mature libraries. It is a chicken and egg problem.

I think your contribution would be very welcome, especially with a bit of docs or minimal examples.

I don't think it's an "early ecosystem" though... I was playing with Clojure before I had ever heard of Go, Elixir, Julia, Rust, or Typescript. All of these seem like mature ecosystems now. I really like Clojure as a language, but if it's still an "early ecosystem" at this point, that seems like a problem to me.

True, although I don't know which library the op is talking about, because all the libraries I use are alive and well, some get very rare updated simply because they are "done"

You can't call it "early ecosystem" after 15 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com