I love Clojure the language but I’ve never seen a more fragmented ecosystem.
There seems to be a pattern in the language of “a problem emerges > a community solution gains traction > Cognitect develops their own solution but its weird and undocumented”, like deps.edn over leiningen, spec over malli, pedestal over ring, etc.
Many prominent clojurists recommend deps.edn over leiningen and socket repl over nrepl, but I’ve seen very little guidance on how either actually work or how to use them.
Spec seems kind of weird and not well thought out either.
And Clojure CLI tools also seem like a total shitshow compared to go or rust’s tooling.
As a result working with Clojure feels puzzling and unpleasant, and I feel hesitant to use any community library or project in the language.
> deps.edn
Deps is well documented.
The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.
> socket repl over nrepl
I personally use Calva (VSCode) which just starts an nrepl based on deps.edn. When writing babashka scripts I start the repl manually and connect to it. Very pleasant experience so far.
> Spec seems kind of weird and not well thought out either.
I didn't like it at first, but once I got that everything is bottom up I had an AHA moment. Function specs and instrumentation are very powerful. Conform is basically a parser, which can give you a lot of leverage.
What bothers me about spec is that it is still not released though.
> The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.
This seems like a contradiction, because if it was well documented you wouldn’t need to look at other people’s configs to see how to use it.
My experience with deps.edn is that every time I start a project and make a deps.edn file, I immediately draw a blank and don’t know how to structure it, so I open ones from other projects to start lifting stuff out of them.
I still don’t know how to reliably configure a project to use nrepl or socket repl without just using an editor plugin. I definitely have no idea how to use those in conjunction with a tool like reveal.
To me, none of that is simple. Simple would be like Emacs’ use-package. With that I know how to add dependencies, specify keybinds, and do initialization and configuration off the top of my head knowing only the name of a package I want to use. And it has really nice documentation with tons of examples.