[bcrosby95]

In general I find Clojure's "power" to be its simplicity.

As you mention, if you're building websites/services, I think the biggest "problem" with Clojure is the community hasn't rallied behind any particular framework.

I'm reminded a bit of companies. The point of a large, successful company is to slow its employees down enough so they don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The point of a startup is to find the goose.

When it comes to programming, Java is the former. There's nothing particularly special about Java that keeps you from coloring outside the lines, so to speak. It just makes both coloring outside and inside the lines harder.

Of course, in steps the standard frameworks everyone uses.

I contrast Clojure a bit with Elixir. I find both to be similarly "powerful", in similar and different ways. But the community has rallied behind a web framework (Phoenix) and it's pretty easy for the average web dev to just read a book and be told how they should do everything.

[slifin]

I can't remember where but Rich Hickey at one point said himself web development isn't a solved problem

If you agree web development isn't a solved problem, do you want to couple your entire language to a massive framework that is committed to solving an un-solved problem in the general sense using technique X that presumably will need to be replaced Y years down the line? Or not work in situation Z

Personally I don't want that for Clojure, instead I see lots of different approaches in Clojure (and some outside) that could be the next big thing:

- https://www.hyperfiddle.net/

- https://github.com/whamtet/ctmx

- https://github.com/leonoel/missionary

- Unison

Ultimately I want to go long on my programming language and short on "the one true framework" until we have a one size fits all approach for solving the general problem of web development, until then give me low coupling libraries that I can mix and match

And that's exactly what Clojure is doing right now, maybe in the end it will be something like chatgpt just mix and matching the approaches for you but for now I'm personally not looking for a framework to be the only way to use Clojure

[riwsky]

Frameworks being imperfect doesn’t mean devs can do better without them. The libraries a-la-carte approach makes it very easy to mess up cross-cutting concerns like security, a fact the clojure community has known for a while now: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CBL59w7fXw4

[cultofmetatron]

I built my startup on elixir.

Once you get past the syntax, a lot of the day to day thinking about how to model your solution in the context of the system is similar. to the point that I'd say elixir is Clojure with a ruby like syntax. elixir has let bindings but they are implicit and blend into the language. you don't really think about them. At the same time, you have all teh standard fare of a functional enough language without all the type ceremony.

Id say its more convenient to work with elixir day to day. Less tracking of parenthesis and the code naturally comes out looking more uniform. There is the price that macros are harder to write in elixir. That is not to say its difficult but lisps in general make writing a macro so damn easy that anything else feels difficult in comparison. I think its a good compromise. Its just difficult enough to make avoid creating macros until you REALLY need them.

[jeremyjh]

Elixir doesn't have the same problem of everyone building their own framework each time they build an application, though. Almost every web project uses Phoenix and inherits a whole series of tools and practices that less experienced devs would never think of until it is too late. Every database project uses Ecto with its well-typed schemas and changeset validations etc. Clojure has equivalent things but you have to not only find them, but first find the need for them.