On May 5, 2015, at 11:48 PM, Kristo Koert <kristo.ko...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 is particularly frustrating from the point of view of someone involved in ClojureBridge, where the whole point is to reach out to tech minorities and encourage complete beginners to try Clojure. The issue has been raised several times and is pretty much always shut down by "those in charge". It was a huge struggle just to have the Getting Started page updated to remove complexity and point at the wiki instead (although the wiki is also _horrible_ from the point of view of new users). It shows through in Clojure tooling as well (the most popular editor — Emacs — is far from beginner-friendly). ClojureBridge chose LightTable because it seemed to be the most beginner-friendly (even tho’ you still needed Leiningen). CCW and Cursive are great for developers who already use IDEs but not for folks who’ve never programmed before. Some of the other easy on-ramps are too clunky right now to stick with beyond initially learning Clojure — and LightTable has the added benefit of being a good editor for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with live in-browser evaluation). Unfortunately, LightTable development has stalled and its future is rather unclear. The "rough edges" show up on a lot of things in the Clojure ecosystem. I know I suck at documentation which is why I moved clojure.java.jdbc’s documentation out to http://clojure-doc.org/articles/ecosystem/java_jdbc/home.html <http://clojure-doc.org/articles/ecosystem/java_jdbc/home.html> which can be maintained by the community through Pull Requests etc. In two years, there have been just two small changes from the community: the rest of the updates are from me, despite several people complaining about the documentation being unclear or insufficient. I think this is also part of the reason behind the lack of approachable and well-maintained web frameworks: the sense that smart people don’t need them and beginners will either figure it out or they won’t — that and the fact that the majority of us in the Clojure community seem to suck at documentation (with a few shining exceptions!). Sean Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) -- 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 --- 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+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
