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Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

Clojure fans seem quite taken to hyperbole. If the language is such a "joy", "ultra-productive" etc I would have expected after such a long period of existence some major open source project to be showing off what the language attributes allow you to do.

Happy to stand corrected if there is such a slam-dunk showcase that I've missed, I am actually interested to dig into clojure, if nothing else as a way to deepen my understanding of functional programming.

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To name a few: https://github.com/xtdb/xtdb, https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk, https://github.com/penpot/penpot, https://github.com/metabase/metabase

I hadn't really though about it until your comment, but Metabase really is a joy to work with.

Thanks. I don't know to what extend its "better-because-of-clojure" but I also found overtone https://github.com/overtone/overtone which should be good fun (though the underlying synthesizer is supercollider/C++).

Overtone is interesting because the guy who really kicked it off went on to make Sonic Pi which is Ruby based[1].

[1] - https://sonic-pi.net/

As I understand it, the server is being switched over to Erlang https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/tree/dev/app/server...

Clerk is amazing!

I think the Roam Research style backlinked knowledge management apps are directly enabled by datascript.

Two "copy cats" (not meant to be derogatory) of Roam that are open source are: https://github.com/logseq/logseq https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

The underlying in memory datalog style database that can run in the browser that enables these apps https://github.com/tonsky/datascript

Athens is dead btw. Logseq ate their lunch.

I guess it's impossible to know what you've seen before and dismissed as not having sufficient features/attributes/popularity. Or what types of project would cause you to dig in but here are a few innovative projects using clojure that represent a fairly diverse set of interests.

- https://github.com/overtone/overtone - https://xtdb.com/ - https://github.com/kennytilton/matrix - https://github.com/metasoarous/oz

Clojure is associated with the JVM platform, Java and Scala and Kotlin end user open source apps are also underrepresented relative to dev population. There are lots of OS Clojure projects but they are mostly tooling, libs, databases, etc. There are a lot of business and data stuff most of which isn't open source.

Come to think of it are there many TypeScript open source apps either?

Apache has mostly jvm language projects but interestingly there is no single clojure example https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?language#C#

NB: Kotlin is not seen there either (fairly new) but does feature quite a few mobile apps on f-droid

In any case the thread includes now a number of good project suggestions to explore

There is something about the language and/or community that leads folks to build their own X instead of collaborating on a common open-source version of X.

Perhaps the lisp learning curve is high enough to dissuade those who want to contribute to a project but don't yet know Clojure?

I have a pet theory that it's because it's too easy to write code in. I think there needs to be just enough pain with a language or library that it becomes worthwhile to allow someone else to write X and just deal with it being imperfect if it still solves your problem.

too easy and too fun.

Also, to anyone interested in this problem, look for the Worse is Better paper

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