The ruby-like syntax and the VERY open and newbie-friendly community have definitely contributed to this.
I've been to Elixir conferences, and they felt like people were just encouraging each other to build solid software WITH each other. I've not seen this level of camaraderie for other programming language communities.
Elixir devs — and I am super biased here — are a special bunch :)
That's great to hear! I get the same feeling towards the Clojure community as well, some of the friendliest, smartest and most helpful people hanging out at the Clojure watering holes (in comparison to other languages I've worked with). I also am constantly in awe of the output of the Clojure world. There are like 3 or 4 great podcasts going, so many cool projects being worked on, especially for a community which seems to be sadly so small.
Cognitect, the company behind Clojure also has their own podcast but I haven't found it to be that interesting most of the time, at least yet: https://www.cognitect.com/cognicast/index.html
Not specifically Clojure-related but has discussed a few times including wit Rich Hickey (as well as other unrelated great conversations!): CaSe https://www.case-podcast.org/
Completely not at all about Clojure but great software podcasts:
Go Time: Even though I hardly ever write Go, I find their conversations to be really great and having lessons beyond Go. It helps that I am interested in the language though: https://changelog.com/gotime
I’ve listened to some Defn with mixed results. I really liked their interview with Daniel Higginbotham, especially when they argued a bit about what “simple” means.
Even if some of the others have gone quiet, there plenty of backlog to choose interesting episodes from. The Bike Shed also looks right up my alley. They probably should have had some more discussion before choosing that name, though.
Community can definitely play a role though I can't help but think that Phoenix and the proselytizing done by Jose and co are the main factors.
Sure, we have Luminus in the Clojureverse but its just not as easy and straightforward as the Rails-like experience of Phoenix. You don't have Hickey personally responding to comments on HN/Reddit etc.
Hickey is extremely remote from the Clojure community. Most of Cognitect is. Really, only Alex Miller engages on a regular basis. To a lesser extent, Fogus and Ghadi do, too.
I would agree here that the combination of being "closed to collaboration", the slow pace of development lately, and really infrequent communication from the sole owner/leader/BDFL does send a weird vibe and raises some concern regarding what direction the language is going to be going in in the future.
One of the big reasons, in my opinion, for Clojure failing to fulfill its potential as a mainstream language. Clojure had SO much going for it then it just flatlined. Sad indeed and very much down to its stewardship.
Isn’t one of the beauties of lisp is that you don’t need much from the language creator. It should be far more stable than non-lisp languages, and you can implement most ideas with macros outside of the core language.
Maybe not, but I do agree with him, too many people in open source feel entitled to get stuff for free (beer) without contributing, many corporations that leech on open source as well.
For the most part, Clojure is tuned for experienced developers I think. It's kind of an oximoron, but it feels like it was Rich Hickey's goal as well, to not appeal to any of the "easy" and "convenient" and "familiar", but focus entirely in "no bs", "simple" and "very flexible" pieces that never break backwards compatibility, are always open for extension, keep performance in mind, reaches for battle tested hosts when it can, and all that.
There's a big downside to Clojure having the most amount of experienced developers I think in bringing beginners in. You'd think it be the opposite, but beginners are better treated by other passionate smart beginners and people who just got out of being a beginner. As experienced old devs tend to not have the time or patience or not know how to explain things or make it beginner friendly.
Honestly I wouldn't be using Elixir if it wasn't for my co-founder's singing the praises of Phoenix & Liveview. I'd tried it once about a year ago but couldn't see any advantage over Clojure (esp. with re-frame). Sadly he was never going to move to Clojure.
That said, now I've dug in and really used it for solving some problems I am finding it an elegant and enjoyable experience.
I'd happily use either although I think Elixir has a particular fit to web applications.
Elixir seems to be very approachable. But some of the strengths of Clojure are unmatched, such as Java/JS interop, isomorphic code for web development, and generally being a Lisp (which includes macros).
Elixir has macros. People are currently building Nx https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx while not having to change anything in the language. Java/JS interop being unmatched is true, but Elixir has Erlang interop too.
LiveView sorta tackles the isomorphic web development side, and while I agree that Lisp is a better syntax you do have hygienic macros in Elixir as well.
Yes and no. Yeah Erlang has been around for 30 years but "30 year old language" makes it sound like it came out 30 years ago and then stopped. Erlang is still being very actively developed and improved, it's by no means a crusty old language.
Although Microsoft has made it from Microsoft Research into official Visual Studio, it has been mostly an up hill fight to keep it there, while .NET languages group mostly cares about C# and VB, and to certain extent C++/CLI for integration with Windows APIs.
F# when taken into account by management, comes always after those three.
Most of the Visual Studio tooling for C# and VB isn't available to F# projects, you are supposed to do it manually, e.g. GUI designers, EF database to code generation, .NET 5 code generators.
its funny you say that, Ruby ALSO took a lot from Lisp and lisp like langugaes. there's even a built in parser in Ruby that converts the language into S-expressions
require 'ripper'
Ripper.sexp('a && b')
=> [:program, [[:binary, [:vcall, [:@ident, "a", [1, 0]]], :"&&", [:vcall, [:@ident, "b", [1, 5]]]]]]
Ripper.sexp(<<-RB)
if a
b
else
c
end
RB
=> [:program, [[:if, [:vcall, [:@ident, "a", [1, 5]]], [[:vcall, [:@ident, "b", [2, 4]]]], [:else, [[:vcall, [:@ident, "c", [4, 4]]]]]]]]
I've been to Elixir conferences, and they felt like people were just encouraging each other to build solid software WITH each other. I've not seen this level of camaraderie for other programming language communities.
Elixir devs — and I am super biased here — are a special bunch :)