Is this lang for web dev?
On the backend side, you start your server once, and whenever you change it locally, you apply what you changed directly to the running process, so you don't lose any state and without having to restart the server at all, so iterating on the program becomes very easy. Bugs are easy to track down too, as you can evaluate parts ("forms") of the program inside the process itself, debugging becomes a breeze.
On the frontend side, you have ClojureScript that basically enables the same but in a browser environment. Usually I have the browser on the right, my editor on the left, and whenever I "evaluate a function", it runs in the browser context, so again same thing; the frontend keeps the same state even after your changes, so no more "make change -> wait for compilation -> get frontend into the state that reproduces the issue -> output debug info -> make change again", you just change one part, see the page update and then continue changing.
If you've used React+Redux (or similar) before, it's basically that experience, but much tighter and together with code evaluation inside of the browser context. If I recall correctly, Redux was pretty much directly inspired by ClojureScript and Reagent in the first place, I think Abramov even referenced ClojureScritp/Reagent in the first Redux talk.
BUT
it doesn't have the equivalent of rails, mostly because lispers are an opinionated bunch and can't come together to agree on how web development should be done
the frameworks that do exist are more of a collections of libraries with some plumbing to connect the dots
One big library/framework has huge benefits and network effects, from enabling a big 3rd party plugin ecosystem, to a deeper documentation literature (including paid courses, books, and AI). It means that there's less or virtually zero getting up to speed when changing from one project to an other. It means that the upstream framework team takes care of upgrades whereas you have to consider, when a new technology comes up, how to integrate this into your stack. There's a reason that Laravel, Django, Rails, and Spring each have thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of times more websites in production than all of Clojure combined.
At a meta/discourse level, I also find the Clojure community's tendency to constantly deny and downplay any criticism or even just issue that people face to be really frustrating and counter productive.
Yes, but this is intentional. Django developers are optimizing for "easy" which makes it fast to spin up project after project, Clojure developers are optimizing for "simple" which means way longer time to get the project of the ground, to nail all the design before things start to actually be put together, which makes it easier and faster to iterate on the same codebase after years of working on.
Ask the Django developer how easy it is for them to add features after a project they've done that approach with for N years, then compare it to a Clojure codebase, and you'll notice the difference.
Sure, I guess this is "downplaying" and "denying", personally I see people who disagree with me as people who disagree with me, that's fine, I thought that was why we were sharing our opinions in this forum in the first place. But anyways, if you're very deep into "frameworks are clearly superior in every case", that we disagree probably matters less. Best wishes regardless!
I think there are lots of well maintained Django projects. In fact, if I do a search on AI and on google for what one web stack probably has the lowest overall total cost of ownership including maintenance years down the line, Django usually is what comes up, without even specifically searching for/mentioning it.
> if you're very deep into "frameworks are clearly superior in every case"
This is a mischaracterization of what I have said, and is more like the extreme position that Clojure devs seem to take. The original commenter said that Clojure is wonderful, but it's too bad that [for the people who want it,] there isn't the option of a well maintained, all-in-one, batteries included framework. You deny that this is a problem, saying that actually a well-chosen set of libraries are superior (I guess in every case, because if not then it actually would be a problem sometimes).
But I'm not sure a framework is really going to change that onboarding process, or help with network effects that much. Elixir has a de facto framework, but it's barely more popular than Clojure. I mean, we had Leiningen starter kits and we have Kit. But what's confusing to me wasn't setting up a project, it was learning how it was wired together. Wiring small libraries together and just passing data can feel surprisingly leaky, and I don't really have to peak into the internals of Laravel the way I do Clojure projects.
I think Biff is a promising step in the right direction. I think the way it has wired things up is easier to follow. But for whatever reason, they made the choice to use XTDB as a default, which is a huge cognitive burden for newcomers. They have an article on how to use something else instead, but this is already getting out of the "it just works" territory if you haven't even learned Clojure yet. But the author is a really nice and talented person, and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes.
> I think there are lots of well maintained Django projects. In fact, if I do a search on AI and on google for what one web stack probably has the lowest overall total cost of ownership including maintenance years down the line, Django usually is what comes up, without even specifically searching for/mentioning it.
Having used Clojure, Laravel, Spring, and Django, I wouldn't touch Django again with a 10 foot pole. I don't know what you're referring to by "doing a search of lowest cost of ownership" but it sounds pretty unscientific. Anecdotally, I do legacy apps, and I have picked up people's Django apps, and I've never loved what I saw. It's a classic fast to start, slow to maintain framework. Huge businesses have been built on it, but huge businesses have been built on everything.
having one commonly accepted and recommended way does improve onboarding, because it collapses the decision space beginners face. right now they are supposed to make decisions (not even directly, but just through selecting one of the many frameworks) about things like:
1. which project templating tool to use? (lein, clj-new, neil)
2. which dependencies management tooling to use? (lein, deps)
3. which build tooling to use? (lein, tools build, boot)
4. which web server? (jetty, httpkit, undertow)
5. which routing library? (pedestal, reitit)
6. which templating engine? (hiccup, rum, selmer)
7. how to deal with javascript and it's build tooling? (clojurescript with a host of it's own decisions, bolt ts/js and wire it yourself, dodge that completely with htmx)
yes, multiple frameworks exist that make those choices for you, but then you inevitably hit the problem that some of the components haven't been updated in a while, so documentation is out of date and when you try updating it just for your project you need to fix the framework plumbing and due to number of frameworks, the corpus of useful information on the internet is quite fragmented and the community help is limited, and on and on.
none of this is good beginner experience.
and don't get me wrong, choice by itself isn't bad, focus on composability of smaller libraries is important, dominant framework is not going to improve anything when it locks people into bad decisions.
what we lack is convergence behind a single "reference stack" of libraries that ought to be good enough for the general case and a minimal framework of plumbing that doesn't require dozens of files just to get started.
there doesn't need to be a single way of doing it, but there needs to be a single recommended way of doing it.
What I'm suggesting is Elixir has everything you're talking about in Phoenix, yet it's still an extremely niche language most people haven't even heard of. Because come on, it's a totally different paradigm than what people are trained to program in. I understand the mental math of "easier means more people," but I don't think that's really going to cut it for Clojure. I had full projects spun up the minute I started learning, but that wasn't where the difficulty was.
So yes, I think having a solid framework is good for Clojure, but the original person suggested it's not popular because it doesn't have one, and I just don't think that's true.
i agree that it's not a sufficient condition, but it's an important factor and it would significantly improve the onboarding process by collapsing the decision space beginners have to navigate
even going by your definition of onboarding (the effort of getting more people) - dispersing that effort across multitude of dimensions and directions is certainly less effective than coordinating and converging
not intending to have an argument about popularity, but since you keep bringing up elixir - there's a lot that can be said about elixir/phoenix as to why they aren't more popular than they are, but they are more popular than clojure in every recent ranking i've checked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
if anything, elixir/phoenix is a good example for how strong default improves onboarding and ecosystem cohesion, even if it doesn't make the language broadly popular
i don't look at it from perspective of "what should clojure do to be more popular than php" - there are fundamental reasons why that just can't happen in this timeline
i look at it from perspective of "what does this ecosystem lack that makes it hard for beginners to get going and stick"
and lack of "single recommended way of doing it" is at the top of my list
This led to a lot of Clojure code being simple, but avoiding the hard additional work of also making it easy, and sometimes in even making it complete.
The prime example was tools.deps/deps.edn. It largely supplanted Leiningen for new code, but by being simple and minimal, it led to an explosion of ad hoc, custom tooling for 2-3 years afterwards, as everyone rewrote functionality that Lein already had, but tools.deps was missing. (And I say this as someone who once lost a whole week debugging a subtle maven/lein set ordering bug.)