I have evaluated clojure for the last couple of days, and it is both my own professional decision and my recommendation to the professional organizations that I belong to and report to that clojure is not ready for prime time.
Before any of you think that I am a disgruntled newbie turned troll, know the following: 1)As soon as I see the copy of this email in my "clojure mailbox", I will unsubscribe from this mailing list, delete the clojure mailbox and I will not be following up in any way. 2)In as much as clojure is a new programming language with a small but enthusiastic user base and a brilliant developer I confess to a certain deja vu here. That would be rebol 10 years ago. Brilliantly conceived, brilliantly designed by one of the best programmers on the planet. Never went anywhere. I've used rebol for 10 years steadily and made a lot of money with it, but there is almost 0 demand for rebol programmers out there. 3)Although I may be a noob with it comes to clojure and even more of a noob when it comes to java, I have been a professional analyst and programmer for 21 years and own my own company. Many seasoned programmers, analysts and system adminstrators look at a new system as something to "employ". As a front end for java, I do not consider clojure to be "employable". I think that clojure is brilliantly conceived and it is clear from what I have read of Rich Hickey's words that his vision is right in the same channel with mine, but that is not the problem. The fact that I respect the developer and the product is the reason that I have taken this time to write this email. The reason I choose NOT to employ clojure can be summed up in three words. ------------------- Install and deploy. ------------------- I consider this to be clojure's fatal weakness. Certainly I can get clojure up and running, but "selling" clojure to a sysadmin is going to be a problem at this time. There was a time when PHP was NOT present on virtually all webservers. PHP got it's "foot in the door" because it was very easy to deploy. Consider the two threads that I started up - one is titled "Web programming in Clojure" - there's the good stuff. Generous reponse, lots of input. The other one is titled "Installation issues on slack 13.0 (ant?)". This where it all falls apart. Sadly, this is like the first impression and we all know how lasting first impressions are. In fact as you can see, the thread ended with no resolution. I'm sorry to pick on "steve" but his response is a case study * Steve <stephen.a.lind...@gmail.com> [100320 05:24]: > Reading the getting started page on the website will get you further > still : http://clojure.org/getting_started Sadly inadequate! Check out the comparable kawa resources and instructions for a better example. > If you do need ant then a more modern distro will make your life much > easier (eg. apt-get install ant). Again, so inadequate. I also use ubuntu. Have for years. apt-get is a thing of beauty. When it works. And bye the way, slackware is much more modern when it comes to up-to-date build tools. So know I not only have to "sell" clojure to the sysadmins, I have to sell them ubuntu too? Good luck with that! Here's how I installed the flash player on my system. 1)Downloaded install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz 2)Unzipped libflashplayer.so 3)Copied to /usr/lib/firefox-3.5.2/plugins/ Make clojure "install and deployment" like the example above and more of us will EMPLOY clojure and 10 years from now there WILL be a market for clojure programmers. Goodby and good luck. -- Tim t...@johnsons-web.com http://www.akwebsoft.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
