You're not being rude, but you are being patronising.
Since you've been using Clojure full time for 11 years, don't you think there's chance that you might be biased yourself? I mean, you've basically used it since it was only just released and the library ecosystem is bound to be in flux just after a new language gets any traction.
I BTW never said Clojure was immune to churn. I just said it is comparable to any other language... which it is. You misrepresented my original reply which I find really disingenuous. It might not have been comparable to other languages a decade ago, but it sure is now. And the situation is much better than the most popular language at the moment, JavaScript.
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I've been using Clojure/ClojureScript as my only language for more than 3 years. Currently on my third Clojure job. Prior to that, I was a heavy user of mainly Python, PHP and Java... all of them in anger (that's such a weird expression, but whatever).
I think your issues must be very tied to the data science domain? I've been following, though not actively using, the data science libraries in Clojure and it's true that the data science ecosystem seems quite immature compared to Python. Incanter was already DOA when I started using Clojure, Cortex came and went, Dragan's libraries are a sort of foundation that hasn't been tapped into yet, and now there's all this Python/R integration going on. Data visualisation seems to have converged heavily on Vega as of late.
But I'm doing web development and parsing. I find that the ecosystem is very stable for that sort of usage. Reagent is the default for frontend, Re-frame the most popular state-management library. There's an ecosystem around these two libraries that many tap into. There are basically only two popular SQL libs available (hug and honey, both using jdbc at their core), so you just pick whichever one fits your use case the best. It sucks that you went through 4 different ones, but I don't think that's very representative. Ring is the standard protocol for most web backends. There seems to be a convergence towards Datomic-style Datalog for newer Clojure databases. Instaparse is the only game in town for parsing using grammars and Clojure spec is widely used (although it's alpha) and can also used for certain forms of parsing.
The only thing I've really been changing has been my tooling, moving from Leiningen/figwheel to Clojure CLI/Shadow-cljs. And I didn't have to do that, it was only done out of an interest to explore these newer tools.
We’ve also made the same migration, working with cljsjs and lein-npm was horrible previously and Shadow is indeed nicer. We also use re-frame, and I have no real complaints with it, beyond Om having had a superior GraphQL like approach to querying but we managed to swerve that bullet because Om never looked finished or really intuitive. Many others did commit to it though.
Are you on the now largely deprecated clojure.java.jdbc or next.jdbc? Fun to rewrite all those serialisers to and from complex Postgres types. Also Instaparse is nice but dog slow compared to clj-antlr and I’ve had to write projects with both. There is no end to my safari park of pet peeves.
Anyway, I love Clojure and you’re obviously allowed to be happy with your tools. I wish you a long and productive career without grumpy folks like me sniping. But please don’t tell me my experience of this ecosystem is wrong or an outlier, because it’s really not. It is a core part of a culture based on granting power and flexibility to the smartest programmers. That comes at the cost of stability and productivity for other classes of programmer. You can’t optimise for everything.
I didn't say your experience was an outlier, just that you're surely a bit biased towards a certain point of view having taken up Clojure right after it was birthed. But yes, your experience is bound to be an outlier compared to people starting to use it in much a more mature state, which will be nearly everyone in the long run.
As for jdbc, I don't use it currently, but did at my old job (along with honey sql). If you think you have to rewrite some DB access code just because there's a newer library out, maybe the real problem is not Clojure, but your mindset. Perhaps something to think about.
The old library has always been painfully slow on large datasets, and is no longer actively maintained so that isn't getting fixed. And because Clojure people expect you to compose libraries not use frameworks, these sorts of upgrades are never transparent. Thus, a whole new library, the Clojure way.
And again, this is every year I've used Clojure (e.g. the Shadow migration you yourself went through on what I can only assume was one tiny web app). I'll happily stop patronising your 3 years experience if you stop gaslighting mine. You'll be telling people you never get type errors and you find Clojure's stacktraces really readable next, all the greatest hits. :)
Not sure what you think your many straw men are going to accomplish. Pretty sure almost no one but the two of will be reading this...?
I guess you think your attitude is a mark of superiority, but in reality you sound about as intellectual as Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.
I'm not trying to sound intellectual, I'm just trying to convince you my experience is real. I posted a very simple response to the article, detailing one direct consequence of a preference for libraries over frameworks. You're the one that jumped in to tell me I was making it up.
You can take personally any criticism of your favourite language and its proponents (I'm still one of them, honest!), or you can approach technology with a degree of scepticism. Really no interest of mine, and it's clear the feeling is mutual. Good luck in your future endeavours (and for what it's worth, I used to work for a Clojure NLP startup so I do genuinely mean that - wouldn't it be nice if there was a nice cohesive framework for NLP tasks in Clojure?)
