[Capricorn2481]

I don't disagree with what you're saying. But by "onboarding process" I mean the effort of getting more people into Clojure, not the experience for a single person.

What I'm suggesting is Elixir has everything you're talking about in Phoenix, yet it's still an extremely niche language most people haven't even heard of. Because come on, it's a totally different paradigm than what people are trained to program in. I understand the mental math of "easier means more people," but I don't think that's really going to cut it for Clojure. I had full projects spun up the minute I started learning, but that wasn't where the difficulty was.

So yes, I think having a solid framework is good for Clojure, but the original person suggested it's not popular because it doesn't have one, and I just don't think that's true.

[midnight_eclair]

> the original person suggested it's not popular because it doesn't have one, and I just don't think that's true

i agree that it's not a sufficient condition, but it's an important factor and it would significantly improve the onboarding process by collapsing the decision space beginners have to navigate

even going by your definition of onboarding (the effort of getting more people) - dispersing that effort across multitude of dimensions and directions is certainly less effective than coordinating and converging

not intending to have an argument about popularity, but since you keep bringing up elixir - there's a lot that can be said about elixir/phoenix as to why they aren't more popular than they are, but they are more popular than clojure in every recent ranking i've checked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

if anything, elixir/phoenix is a good example for how strong default improves onboarding and ecosystem cohesion, even if it doesn't make the language broadly popular

i don't look at it from perspective of "what should clojure do to be more popular than php" - there are fundamental reasons why that just can't happen in this timeline

i look at it from perspective of "what does this ecosystem lack that makes it hard for beginners to get going and stick"

and lack of "single recommended way of doing it" is at the top of my list

[joshlemer]

Yeah, Elixir's Pheonix if anything demonstrates how important a flagship framework/stack plays a huge role in driving language adoption. Despite Elixir coming out after Clojure, and running on a VM that is more esoteric/niche than the JVM, and having a host language which is 1000 times smaller in popularity and library ecosystem size, it still is probably more popular than Clojure at this point and almost all of that is from people picking up Elixir to use Pheonix. And Clojure's use is not just staying where it is, it seems to be in free fall. There used to be dozens of Clojure job postings in Canada, now without exaggeration I don't think there's a single one.