What does HackerNews think of clojure-deps-edn?

Yeah this is grim.

There is https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn which solves this but it’s not linked to from any official docs which seems a miss to me. As well as the config and full documentation, it also comes with a video walking you through a demo of all the features.

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

This was the path i was sign posted to take and I felt like onboarding was fun:

    1. I needed to install clojure https://clojure.org/guides/install_clojure
    2. I needed an editor, i wanted to use VSCode so the Calva plugin was what i needed https://calva.io/paredit/ 
    3. I needed to learn how to edit Clojure, i tried going beyond this point without learning paredit and it slowed me down so i came back and invested an evening - in vs code do ctrl+shift+p then choose the calva getting started repl
    4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here  but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey

At this point I was free to do whatever. In my case so far that’s meant a toy project in reframe (loved it), another in luminus (also loved it), then i went off on learning more of the language since i felt lack of familiarity was most of my challenges with my luminus project.

Clojure is one of my fun languages. I laughed along to a TSoding video where the chap was quite openly dismissive of clojure as he went along but everything he tried just worked and fell into place like dominos. It just made me chuckle. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7fylNa2wZaU

I have Bob Nystrom’s interpreters book and i intend to use clojure as i go through that. We’ll see how successful i am…

> When revisiting old projects I have seen countless of Clojure dependencies having died in the meantime. I have replaced utility libraries with more recent utility libraries sometimes several times. Very annoying.

Yes, the "best in class" libraries change every few years in Clojure's universe, but they always bring huge improvements that require completely new APIs.

For instance:

https://github.com/plumatic/schema -> https://github.com/metosin/malli

https://github.com/juxt/bidi -> https://github.com/metosin/reitit

https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel -> https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component -> https://github.com/weavejester/integrant

https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen -> https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn

> So overall Clojure is in a strange situation. For picking it up on-the-job its not the responsible choice probably for most situations I work in. For my private tinkering the JVM dependency feels just a little too heavyweight. I don't see that Clojure will hit an inflection point of adoption in any way in the future that would make it a viable candidate for me to use at work.

I think about programming languages as tools for different bottlenecks.

– Computational: Rust

– Networking: Go

– Business logic: Clojure / Python

And for many people Python has everything that Clojure is missing: a very low barrier to enter, and a very stable and well-documented ecosystem of frameworks and libraries.