I've posted this quote before, but it might help explain why making Clojure easier to get into maybe hasn't been a priority for Hickey et al.
So we need players. I would rant here, but I won't. But look at this guitar player with blisters. A harpist has blisters, a base player with blisters. There's this barrier to overcome for every musician. Imagine if you downloaded something from GitHub and it gave you blisters. - Rich Hickey (Design, Composition and Performance)
Clojure seems more concerned with power, expressiveness, and reach, rather than ease of use. Does this alienate new users, sure, but the Clojure community seems OK with that as a trade-off.
I am full to my neckline with Clojure kool-aid: I love the language and programming experience. But the "getting started" your parent is referring to, IMO, is getting the tooling set up, getting the repls connected, figuring out what a full-stack app looks like with its 2 distinct repls and toolchains and lein config mashups, hooking up an editor... and then having it break the next day. After 5 years of Clojure I still get frustrated if I'm away for more than a month.
It's like you were getting blisters from stringing your guitar. You buy a guitar, get home, and it takes three days to open the case. Then another week to figure out which strings go where. God help you when you realize you have to tune the thing.
Two, five, seven days pass and you haven't played a note. I don't think that's what Hickey meant.
Spot on with your amusing guitar analogy. Getting to play notes seems like an afterthought, but when it does it plays for you as if it reads your mind to do so. The problem is the setup and that's the part that I dislike these days, the patience to to configure the tools is not there, a lot of the tools are like black boxes, something goes wrong and it isn't visible or or it is too complex to enjoy the process.
If you're not familiar with the JVM, I think this is a big ask for most people as far as ease is concerned. I have created a template on my github to use clojurescript with your typical NPM setup that would allow you to get started right away. I know of no equivalent in the JVM world mostly because of how tightly Oracle controls the download experience of the JDK.
No, you should almost certainly be using openjdk, which oracle jdk is based off, unless you have a compelling reason an alternative implementation is better.
OpenJDK releases become unmaintained as soon as a new release comes out, not ideal for anyone who cares about stability. Zulu and Corretto backport bug and security fixes to supported releases.
I agree that it doesn't have to be a trade-off, but that mindset might explain why there is less focus on creating one-click installers.
An example would be Clojure's newish approach to managing projects via the CLI and deps.edn. It's very powerful, and expressive, but definitely not a one-click approach.
Clojure is an inspirational language that has some insightful opinions about how things should be done. A month spent learning Clojure is a great investment. A lifetime programming in Clojure would be a joy.
But as I recall the original Rich Hickey talks on "Why Clojure?" he was explicit that dependency/project management were very hard problems that Clojure didn't really attempt to solve.
I'm not aware of any Clojure tools that are best-of-breed for project management. Java has a better model for locking everything down (or maybe how the Linux Distros manage their repositories) and Python has a better model for just keeping up with the current state of things. I'm not aware of any half-and-half model that gives satisfying results.
Clojure is inferior to Java in that aspect because the number of things to keep track of roughly doubles (for every concept there seems to be a Clojure version and a Java version) and library management is bizarre and warty - see also the horrible import/require/use/some other one I can't even remember mess. And then there is unpicking the syntax differences between using things in the (ns) macro vs calling direct. I dunno; maybe something changed but that part of the experience is a mess. Unusually poorly done in Clojure too, everything else was so lovely.
I never got on top of it and I tried for months; as evidenced I can't even remember how to load a library after putting it down for a little while. Even assuming the classpath is correctly set. What would have to happen for a C programmer to forget #include "name.h" ?
> I'm not aware of any Clojure tools that are best-of-breed for project management. Java has a better model for locking everything down (or maybe how the Linux Distros manage their repositories)
Uh? Clojure locks everything down as a well. In fact, deps.edn solves many issues experienced with Maven.
Personally, I've found Clojure dependency management to be the best I've ever used in any language. It's simple, explicit, gets out of your way, and lets you just do your work.
> and Python has a better model for just keeping up with the current state of things.
I'd like to hear about this? Pip doesn't even have a command to update all dependencies in one go. And figuring what even are the dependencies of any given project is a mess.
> he was explicit that dependency/project management where very hard problems that Clojure didn't really attempt to solve.
For what it's worth, having used Clojure for work for a couple years now, and ditching leiningen for deps.edn (built in package and dependency management that hooks into maven), I've not had an issue with it. You just add the dependencies to your deps.edn, and run your program. If your namespace needs something from a package, you add it to the (:require ...) section of your ns declaration.
Here's an example ns from one of our messiest modules:
To be clear, projects like this can be run with the base Clojure distribution, no additional tools required.
> I'm not aware of any Clojure tools that are best-of-breed for project management. Java has a better model for locking everything down (or maybe how the Linux Distros manage their repositories) and Python has a better model for just keeping up with the current state of things. I'm not aware of any half-and-half model that gives satisfying results.
deps.edn generally asks you for specific versions if you're getting things from maven, so you don't risk not "locking everything down". If you really want to lock everything down however, you should check all your dependencies into your source tree, this is an option that deps.edn supports well, through the :local keyword instead of :mvn/version for maven dependencies. That namespace declaration I showed you is from a subproject that we import into one of our other subprojects using the :local keyword, and the deps.edn for it just declares the source directories and and the dependencies, everything else is handled automatically.
And leaves open a lot of room for someone to try to use (use) which is probably a mistake since you don't use it.
And sometimes your way has [] and sometimes it doesn't. Pretty much at random considering '[profusion.utils :refer :all]'. And the official docs add in a dizzying number of combinations of quoting requirements to recall.
It isn't the end of the world but that is a far cry from how good all the other parts of the language are. It is really sloppy and confusing to learn. There is no recommended approach and I personally can't remember which easy way I used last time so my personal projects cycle randomly. I think Clojure has the worst library loading mechanism of any language I think is good. Even your way has two completely different code paths (import vs require) to bring in dependencies.
> Even your way has two completely different code paths (import vs require) to bring in dependencies.
import and require have different purposes though, it makes perfect sense to me that they are separate. Import, here, is used to import Java classes, which don't hook into Clojure's namespaces directly; require is for bringing in symbols from Clojure namespaces. In general, a beginner or intermediate Clojure user will not touch the :import feature at all, nor the :use feature.
> It is really sloppy and confusing to learn.
That's one opinion of it I guess; though in my experience, the way that I do it is very common in publicly-visible Clojure modules. I've been doing it the same way since day one, without issue. There may be other ways, but you don't really need to care about them.
With this you'll understand most modules you come across, and you'll be able to accomplish basically anything you'll want to.
Given the average completeness of documentation on publicly-visible packages (though to be fair most big ones have what most would consider adequate documentation) including the core, you're going to have lots of opportunities to read other people's modules, and these minutiae will fade into obscurity and be overshadowed by your own program's problem space.
> For what it's worth, having used Clojure for work for a couple years now...
> ...it makes perfect sense to me that they are separate...
> A lib’s container is a Java resource whose classpath-relative path is derived from the lib name [0]
> No matter what some people say, getting started in Clojure is a nightmare. ~ galfarragem (earlier in the thread).
I'm hoping this smorgasbord of quotes is making my point for me - the fact that there is an easy way is good, but the problem is that the easy way is very well hidden and Clojure is competing with systems like 'pip install foo', 'import foo' in every single piece of documentation on Python there is on the internet.
I'm not budging from Clojure's import system being byzantine. I don't care that the people who stuck with Clojure figured out something that works for them, it is stupid and it is a very effective filter on keeping people out of the language. The lesson 'ignore half the reference manual page' is not an appropriate lesson to be learning while working out how to load dependencies.
EDIT If all the other parts of the project build were easy then obviously this wouldn't be an effective filter; but this combined with a misconfigured classpath issue for someone who doesn't know Java well would be the end of it.
Yep..I've found Clojure to be pretty difficult as I have very little Java experience. The language itself is fine, but needing to install and configure so many tools to get anything done is a major turn off. In my opinion, Clojure/Scala/Kotlin on the JVM and F# on .NET all have the same problem of assuming you're a Java or C# developer. I have zero interest in either and asking someone to spend a large amount of time learning them so that I can hop to a language I do like is a stretch. That's why they'll never beat Python in adoption which doesn't require 20 years of knowledge of an entire ecosystem.
No, these are not making your point for you. You bring up :import and :use, but in truth, a beginner or intermediate Clojure user is not going to use either of them at all; and when they choose to, it'll be because they have some deeper knowledge which will make the documentation appropriate to them. :import is primarily for people who understand Java and the JVM. If you know what you're importing, you will understand :import quickly; if you don't know what you're importing, you have no use for :import anyway. In the case of :use, nobody needs :use; it is useful primarily to the people who know why it is useful, and the documentation for it is suitable for that audience.
Getting started in Clojure is not a nightmare, ordinary people do it all the time, the fact that somebody said it was a nightmare says very little.
Clojure's mechanism for requiring packages is far from byzantine, whether you "budge" on that or not; many Clojure libraries have the snippet for including the current stable release of that library at the top of their README on GitHub. It isn't matter of "sticking with it" or "figuring out something that works for you", it is literally one relatively simple piece of knowledge that is learned once and works forever.
In short, if you find namespaces and importing byzantine in Clojure, you are probably at the level of struggling to write fizzbuzz in any language. The fact that there are features other than :require in ns does not indicate that :require is complicated, it just indicates that ns has features.
Somehow a language designed from scratch with all the purported wisdom of Lisp ended up with a nastier import solution than JavaScript, which had none out of the box for its first two decades of life, and then had to reconcile as many as 5 different module systems.
Am I missing something here? The experience is basically the same as the best available in JavaScript/TypeScript, how is it "nastier" or even "nasty" at all?
Also Clojure is doing just fine, not sure what you mean by "dying". The core and the tooling continue to improve, there are lots of libraries, more people writing than ever. I just don't see this death you're describing.
The comments here just strike me as ignorant and incoherent as a whole. Why do people who clearly have no experience actually trying to do something in Clojure have so much to say about it?
Clojure may support things that look daunting to you, but if you actually had any goal other than critiquing the variety of things you actually have no use for, you would not have the difficulties you describe.
Maybe I'm spoiled, I remember JDK setup being a pain on Windows a decade ago when I used it last, if that's the problem then I get it. My spoiled experience on a system with a functioning package manager is basically install-and-go, and
zero configuration required to get CIDER going after that.
I just don't get what's so bad about it, it's basically the same experience as Rust with Cargo; is that another "nasty" experience? What language with package manager has a better experience?
>For what it's worth, having used Clojure for work for a couple years now, and ditching leiningen for deps.edn (built in package and dependency management that hooks into maven), I've not had an issue with it.
>...
>To be clear, projects like this can be run with the base Clojure distribution, no additional tools required.
Didn't you just say that dependency management hooks into Maven? So doesn't that imply you need to get Maven set up before you can run a Clojure project?
> So doesn't that imply you need to get Maven set up before you can run a Clojure project?
Not sure what is meant by "get Maven set up". With Clojure it does not involve any additional work, it's just built in to the Clojure runtime, and it goes ahead and fetches your dependencies either when you ask it to, or right before loading your program for the first time.
I think they just use the Maven repositories, as in the servers themselves, not the Maven client software for Java, whatever that may be (I've never used it).
What turned me of from clojure when I tried it last time was "Why my trivial syntax errors like unmatched brackets or easy semantic errors like wrong number of parameters to 'built in' functiins blow up in my face with java stack that involves some parser or something only after I 'lein run' the program?" I used vs code with most popular clojure plugin and I was expecting more.
Thanks for sharing this... I'd never seen it before.
It does make me wonder how many languages we use that could be compared to bag-pipes... in that even when you learn how to play them expertly, they still sound like an animal being killed.
So we need players. I would rant here, but I won't. But look at this guitar player with blisters. A harpist has blisters, a base player with blisters. There's this barrier to overcome for every musician. Imagine if you downloaded something from GitHub and it gave you blisters. - Rich Hickey (Design, Composition and Performance)
Clojure seems more concerned with power, expressiveness, and reach, rather than ease of use. Does this alienate new users, sure, but the Clojure community seems OK with that as a trade-off.