Thanks, Chad.
I have built quite a few toy and production full-stack Clojure web apps
over the past 6 years or so using leiningen and boot. While both of these
are great tools with a lot of programmer hours invested in them, I realized
recently that neither of them are particularly easy to explain to a novice
Clojure programmer, particularly when you are using them to configure a
full stack web development environment.
Since I hadn't yet tried doing any web dev with the Clojure CLI tools, this
seemed like a good test project to get my feet wet. Despite the seemingly
stripped-down set of options available in deps.edn (just :paths, :deps, and
:aliases), it turned out that the :aliases feature really provides all you
need to bootstrap a wide variety of build tasks directly into the clojure
command.
What I really like best about this approach is that I can now introduce new
programmers to Clojure using command line conventions that they are likely
already familiar with coming from many other popular languages like perl,
python, ruby, or node. So now I can just type:
```
$ clojure
```
and get a REPL. Or I could type:
```
$ clojure script.clj
```
and I'm running a simple single-file Clojure program. If I need something
more complicated, I can just define an alias for a build task a la carte
and type:
```
$ clojure -A:my-task
```
Because taking this approach makes Clojure development look almost
identical to building a program in any of the other languages I mentioned
(and many more that I didn't), it makes the tooling very "easy" (in the
Rich sense) for newbies that I need to train in our company. And when I
want to play power-programmer, I get to have fun just cranking out new
aliases for adventure and profit!
And hey, if you've read along this far, here's a free alias for you to play
with or modify to suit your needs:
```
:minify-css {:extra-deps {asset-minifier {:mvn/version "0.2.5"}}
:main-opts ["-e"
"(use,'asset-minifier.core),(minify-css,\"resources/public/css/style.css\",\"resources/public/css/style.min.css\")"]}
```
Have fun and happy hacking!
Gary
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