I unfortunately agree on the difficulty of entrance for newcomers to clojure and I'd like to add that I've been left feeling that this seem to not be a priority in the community. Once I discussed the visual asthetics of clojure.org on #clojure and although the tradeoff of easy data access and eye candy was explained to me, it was done in a way that left me a bit uneasy.
My argument was that a more visually appealing homepage would leave a better first impression and attract more new beginner developers to check out clojure. (Ex. comparing haskell.org or scala-lang.org vs clojure.org). An opinion was expressed that "we don't need these low quality people in the community". This excludes quite a lot of complete newcomers, because ofcourse they cannot tell the merits or demerits of a languages from a wall of text in unfamiliar syntax from a page that seems to be without much love. They will see a seemingly unappealing language. They will not have the opportunity to learn to not judge a programming language based on the homepage until far later in their careers maybe. This leaves me feeling that clojure is only for the already experienced developers who know the ins and outs of programming and thus know how to choose their tools, so clojure would have a high concentration of high quality partitioners. (although less in number) Such a community would have little use for opinionated web framework, because everyone is smart enough to choose their own tools. Unfortunately I do not feel I fit in and struggle daily to choose the right tools, since there are no clear cut, best general purpose defaults. Just my 2c. Regards Kristo On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 5:42:08 PM UTC+3, Thiago F M wrote: > > My 2 cents: > > I don't think the biggest problem is that the community is fragmented as > there is many options to choose, but that the attitude towards newcomers is > bad. > > Let's say that I was learning clojure about 2 years ago and when I asked > about which web framework should I use, people started raising stuff about > the implementation of those frameworks like pedestal have some very strange > concepts like this one: > > > https://github.com/pedestal/docs/blob/master/documentation/application-overview.md > > So I was like: WTF. I'm fucked. Forget that. Let's just go back to the > clojure book and write a factorial implementation. > > So every once in a while I came back to clojure, did something. Studied > some clojurescript and finally I think that I can write some clojure... but > that took time and I still don't feel good about it. I feel sometimes that > there's a lot of very good people working in Relevance which knows > everything about clojure, but doesn't share anywhere. Maybe if we had a > couple of very good screencasts and proper documentation of how to write a > webapp in clojure available in the web. It could be very optioned(about > what libs to use), it could be even wrong... but getting something done > when you are beginning is way more important than to be concerned about if > you are doing the right thing. > > But that might be just me. > > On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 3:34 PM, Ernie de Feria <ernie....@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> I would like to echo the sentiment expressed by several posters in this >> thread, but with a slight twist. A few years back I picked up Ruby and Ruby >> on Rails as the language/framework to create a website with moderate >> complexity and functionality. I did this without any prior experience with >> the language of framework. What allowed me to quickly pick up both was the >> excellent documentation around the language and framework. For example, >> with the information from http://guides.rubyonrails.org and the >> canonical application built in https://www.railstutorial.org one can >> acquire the necessary knowledge to develop highly functional websites. >> Branching out to leverage "non-canonical" libraries/products then becomes a >> fairly easy exercise (MongoDB instead of MySQL, Mongoid instead of >> ActiveRecords, etc.). What allows that to happen is the momentum built >> around the Rails ecosystem via community participation and documentation. >> >> We have recently started to build our "back end" infrastructure in >> Clojure. Many times we have discussed the value and desire to unify our >> development efforts on and around Clojure. Inevitably we tally up all the >> functionality inherited from Ruby gems (that play nice with Rails - the >> Framework) that would have to be replicated in Clojure and there always >> shortcomings, not necessarily in the availability of libraries that perform >> these functions, but in the readily accessible documentation about how to >> best integrate them. >> >> The "composable libraries over framework" mantra is technically solid. >> What we're missing, in the "web development with Clojure" subset of the >> community, is the stewardship to create and maintain a canonical >> amalgamation of composable libraries and the best practices around them - a >> la https://railstutorial.org. This would lower the barrier of entry into >> the web development realm for Clojure developers. My 2+ cents. >> >> On Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 4:43:53 PM UTC-4, g vim wrote: >>> >>> I recently did some research into web frameworks on Github. Here's what >>> I found: >>> >>> >>> FRAMEWORK LANG CONTRIBUTORS COMMITS >>> >>> Luminus Clojure 28 678 >>> Caribou Clojure 2 275 >>> >>> Beego Golang 99 1522 >>> >>> Phoenix Elixir 124 1949 >>> >>> Yesod Haskell 130 3722 >>> >>> Laravel PHP 268 4421 >>> >>> Play Scala 417 6085 >>> >>> Symfony PHP 1130 20914 >>> >>> Rails Ruby 2691 51000 >>> >>> >>> One could conclude from this that the Clojure community isn't that >>> interested in web development but the last Clojure survey suggests >>> otherwise. Clojure's library composition approach to everything only >>> goes so far with large web applications, as Aaron Bedra reminded us in >>> March last year: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBL59w7fXw4 . Less manpower >>> means less momentum and more bugs. Furthermore, I have a hunch that >>> Clojure's poor adoption as indicated by Indeed.com maybe due to this >>> immaturity in the web framework sphere. Why is it that Elixir, with a >>> much smaller community and lifespan than Clojure's, has managed to put 4 >>> times as much mindshare into its main web framework when its module >>> output, as measured by modulecounts.com, is a tiny fraction of >>> Clojure's? >>> >>> gvim >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Clojure" group. >> To post to this group, send email to clo...@googlegroups.com >> <javascript:> >> Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with >> your first post. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> clojure+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Clojure" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to clojure+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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