clojure-cli-config VS gleam

Programming Clojure 3rd edition does have some minimal coverage of the CLI but it just barely made it to publication and a lot has been added since. You might find the CLI guide (https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli) and CLI reference (https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli) to be helpful for some questions. The Practicalli guide (https://practical.li/clojure/) has a number of good pages and resources on repl, tools, and use.

Yeah this is grim.

There is https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn which solves this but it’s not linked to from any official docs which seems a miss to me. As well as the config and full documentation, it also comes with a video walking you through a demo of all the features.

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

When I'm looking for tooling related stuff I do always check practical.li (https://practical.li/clojure/) since it probably has a good, if terse, description and mostly has links to the good documentation (or at least the best available).

4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey

I haven't had time to really try to write anything in it, but https://gleam.run/ looks really good too. Like Elm for backend + frontend!

Want a friendly language for building safe systems at scale? Gleam is here for you. It features modern and familiar syntax, that's reliable and scalable. Gleam runs on an Erlang virtual machine, and can run plenty of concurrent tasks. It comes with a compiler, build tool, formatter, editor integrations, and package manager all built in so you can get started right away. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major version 🙌.

While I love Clojure, I have to agree about tooling. I recently started using Gleam* and was impressed at how easy it was to get up and running with the CLI tool. I think this is an important part of getting people to adopt a language.

* https://gleam.run/

If you use languages that compile to WASM (such as Gleam https://gleam.run), and can also run Postgres via WASM, then it opens very interesting offline scenarios with codebases which are similar on both the client and the server, for instance.

Recently, Gleam has gained more popularity, and a lot of developers (including me) are learning it. At the time of this writing, it has exceeded 14k stars on GitHub; it grew really fast for the last month.

Oh, strange that github had a date of 2016 on this one: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/issues/2

I was just going by that, though I do remember checking out gleam 5 years ago or so.

Re: macros, I really do think they’re a big deal and all the other newer languages I’ve used, such as Rust have some kind of macros or powerful meta programming features.

For older languages, a few, like Ruby have enough meta programmability to make nice DSLs, but many others don’t. Given the choice, I’d much rather have Elixir/Clojure style macros than other meta-programming facilities I’ve seen so far.

I had been only following this language with some interest, I guess this was born in gitlab not sure if the creator(s) still work there. This is what I'd have wanted golang to be (albeit with GC when you do not have clear lifetimes).

But how would you differentiate yourself from https://gleam.run which can leverage the OTP, I'd be more interested if we can adapt Gleam to graalvm isolates so we can leverage the JVM ecosystem.