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Ask HN: Why does the Clojure ecosystem feel like such a wasteland?
6 points by ilrwbwrkhv on Sept 2, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
A lot of people suggested I look at Clojure because of being a big fan of Common Lisp. I remember in the past I was turned off because of the lack of good documentation.

Surprisingly the case is even worse today?

Two examples: The getting started page remains as bad as I remember it with links to discontinued Github projects.

And the main libraries section https://www.clojure-toolbox.com seems to link to projects where every other one is unmaintained or discontinued.

For example the getting started for Pedestal, one of the main web libraries has its Getting Started page last updated seven years ago? http://pedestal.io/guides/hello-world

Where can I find latest documentation and tools / libraries in a easy to use page or section?



Imagine being so used to library churn that you think it's a bad thing when frameworks and standards are stable.

What exactly are you looking for? A batteries included web framework from the last 5 years? Try biff. https://biffweb.com/


Well there is a difference between stable and abandonware. There are issues open which haven't been addressed and things are just stale. It's a shame because Clojure is a pretty great Lisp.

At least in the official docs, things should be cleaned up and made much more user friendly.

Compare Clojure to Go: https://go.dev/tour/welcome/1

It's a heaven and hell difference.


> At least in the official docs, things should be cleaned up and made much more user friendly.

The source of clojure.org is at https://github.com/clojure/clojure-site/ and it gets a pretty constant stream of updates these days (it even accepts PRs!). It's a huge improvement over what it used to be -- so it depends on what/when you're comparing it to.

If you have specific criticisms or suggestions, I expect they'd be welcomed.


the excellent community is one of the reasons I have been so pleased with Clojure professionally as my favorite stack for the past 8 years. I can't say much about the sites you've mentioned, as I rarely go there. Instead I lean on the highly active community forums, especially https://clojureverse.org/ and https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/ (which aggregates many sources). I originally started my Clojure professional journey with the book Web Development with Clojure, which just (second half of 2023) put out a new edition, which I am excited to read soon. It led me to a "batteries included" collection in Luminus, which I expect has changed to Kit (same author, latest technologies) in the new edition.

How's the community? Go introduce yourself at Clojureverse and you'll find a warm welcome :)


> The getting started page remains as bad as I remember it with links to discontinued Github projects.

I assume you mean https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started. That page has just a handful of links and none of them lead to unmaintained/discontinued projects.

If you mean something else, please be more concrete. "The page has bad stuff" is not actionable, and it's hard to distinguish unmaintained/discontinued/"dead" from complete, even when there are still open issues and users complaining.

Same comment about https://www.clojure-toolbox.com. Keeping track of everything is a _lot_ of work that's IMO unreasonable to expect the author of the toolbox to be doing all the time. As the web page mentions in its footer, "Library suggestions can be submitted [at] the project page" - https://github.com/weavejester/clojure-toolbox.com. And people are doing that, and their suggestions are being taken into account.

> For example the getting started for Pedestal, one of the main web libraries has its Getting Started page last updated seven years ago? http://pedestal.io/guides/hello-world

And?.. Pedestal is stable, its main feature set hasn't changed in years and probably won't change - why would the guide need to be updated? As an analogy - my face hasn't changed all that much in a past few years, and I haven't changed my profile picture in those few years. Does it really mean that I'm unmaintained/dead?

> Where can I find latest documentation [...]?

The answer is still https://clojure.org/. And https://clojuredocs.org/ but it's community-maintained so might occasionally be missing some things right after they're released. E.g. as of this moment Clojure 1.11 is still not there since the maintainer of the website has some technical issues deploying the updated version of the website.

For me personally, the best API-level documentation is the source code.

> Where can I find [...] tools / libraries in a easy to use page or section?

There's no central repository of all the available things since they can be loaded from many places (Clojars, Maven Central, other Maven repositories, S3, Git, local files).

But there are community-maintained lists, like the one you've mentioned at https://www.clojure-toolbox.com (fully manual, AFAIK) or the one at https://phronmophobic.github.io/dewey/search.html (automated but only for GitHub). Perhaps there are others but I'm not familiar with them - most of the time, I myself don't find that much value in such services as I'm usually able to find things with a regular web search engine or ask the community when I need something in particular.




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