[stingraycharles]

You mean the steep learning curve, and lack of “starter pack” type of frameworks (for lack of a better description) is holding you back being more productive with Clojure?

I’ve been doing Clojure professionally for over 5 years now and it’s definitely a known issue that Clojure is very expert-friendly.

[demonshreder]

Getting a 'hang' of clojure as a language is quite easy, my colleague and I took only two weeks to jump into things. Even today, specific code development is order of times faster than we can do in Python.

However, lack of general 'all-purpose' libraries for numerous use cases means we have to implement that API or library in a general way (if only for our use case) then integrate it into the system.

This approach has worked quite well, creating our own template code (as everything is functional) helps reuse across many projects, however the initial investment of time/labour is something we would like to avoid for the sake of finishing the work fast.

[thu2111]

Are you counting Java libs as part of that ecosystem? It seems odd to describe the JVM as lacking all purpose libraries.

[demonshreder]

Java libs are definitely helpful, the time I mentioned includes wrapping Object oriented code into functions. This is easy if all that is required is one or two methods from the Java, however for more than immediate usage, it feels like building a library just because I need to use it.

In Python ecosystem, that labour already done by someone else, preferably who didn't start writing a library just to deliver code within a week.

One good thing about writing libraries in Clojure is the immense stability and composibility it offers. We can use the same code many years later without fearing breakage,a 'primitive' function can also be easily squeezed into numerous other functions which means reusability is quite high.

However, it is still an impediment for shops less than 5 devs.

[thu2111]

So the issue is, you want some sort of bindings rather than directly invoking the Java API. I'm curious, isn't that the sort of thing macros are supposedly good at - could the bindings not be auto generated to a large extent?

[cabite]

Being expert-friendly is not a problem per se for a language. What matters is the ratio between sufficient wage and productivity increase as compared to other languages. By "sufficient wage" I mean paying your experts enough so that they become less rare.

I wouldn't mind paying someone 3 times as much if its expertise in the given language means he can be 10x more productive than an average programmer in an average context. (I personally have measured a 30x incrase in productivity by switching from ruby to clojure and have observed the same phenomenon with other people).