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by kbuchanan
1636 days ago
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It's true, the Clojure ecosystem is especially hostile to newcomers—in my view it's the principle reason the language has not grown more quickly. There are community members have made the documentation much more manageable, but beginners are still very much left to their own to discover solutions to pretty common problems. But I disagree that it reflects poorly on the maintainers—rather, I think it illustrates that, for the most part, Clojure was created by experienced language pragmatists, for other experienced pragmatists. Clojure tends to be a refuge from other languages, not something a person is born into. The State of Clojure each year consistently shows how many other languages Clojure users already knew before coming to the language. I appreciate how the maintainers value backwards-compatibility (nothing ever breaks, it only gets better), that they are strongly committed to making the language great in the long run, and are unmoved from the language's founding values. I do hope as a community we can do a better job for newcomers, for all our sakes—new blood brings new perspectives, but it's okay that "growing the community" isn't the Core team's top priority. (But hopefully becomes someone's priority in the community at some point...) |
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This shows even in the half-life of the Clojure repo: https://m.imgur.com/a/rH8DC
That image is 5 years old now, I saw it in the 2016 discussion linked below, but the trajectory is clear especially when compared to the other popular repos analyzed in the post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13112449