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Comment by askonomm | Hacker News Reader

Been doing Clojure for the past 5 years and while the language itself is great, the ecosystem really isn't. The tooling is subpar, editor support is clunky at best, everything is for some odd reason much harder to set up and explained in a more difficult way. A ton of libraries don't even provide documentation, they just expect you to REPL their functions to find out what they do.

The older I get the more I realize that what makes something great to use isn't all about the language, but the surrounding environment, and how pleasant _that_ is to use. Personally I think I will most likely not Lisp for much longer because I'm seeing many other languages have much nicer to use ecosystems, even if they probably pay less.

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This is the opposite of my experience: one of the main reasons I prefer to use Common Lisp and Clojure over any other language is that the tooling is so much better (emacs + SLIME [CL] or Cider [Clojure]). The only real competitors, imo, are SmallTalk and Prolog environments. However, part of this is the paradigm is completely different and it took me a bit of time to learn what made the tooling great.

Yeah, for Emacs users I'm sure Clojure is great. For the other 99% of us who use VS Code or IntelliJ or something else entirely, it really isn't. Though IntelliJ + Cursive I'd say is probably the best, it still pales in comparison to say Rust or TypeScript support in editors.

I've found Calva for VS Code to be excellent, what do you think is missing there?

I tried Calva a lot and suggested it to my coworkers a while back (2017ish) and it was nothing but trouble. Cursive seemed to work pretty well, though.

AFAICT Calva has come a very long way in 5 years

No parinfer support.

Have you tried Calva for VS Code? Although I don’t use it myself (I use vim-iced with Neovim, which I like very much), I have heard lots of good things about it and it seems very easy to set up and use.

“The tools for Lisp aren’t very good because I don’t use those tools.”

Are you suggesting that one has to forgo their favourite code editors, and learn what is arguably the most complex editor, in order to use Clojure? That's the kind of attitude that makes all beginners run away.

A beginner can use anything but if you’re using Clojure professionally, you should aspire to using the good tools.

Also, emacs isn’t really more complex to use than IntelliJ or Eclipse

You must agree that if the first step in learning a language is "Learn Emacs first", a lot of potential learners are shooed away before they even start. The language has high ceiling, but high floor as well.

I love clojure but do a lot more Rust now. I feel the language leadership is from the information-systems universe - thinking about databases, schemas that sort of thing - and I feel the language and tooling are very good for those sorts of things but there is really no energy or interest in expanding beyond those use cases so it feels like things are settled now and wont change.

Rust OTOH feels highly malleable and the tooling is always improving. The community seems to care about a good user experience across several domains - web, systems, networking, cryptography, desktop gui, and over the last 2 - 3 things are really coming together as coherent whole.

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