edge VS clojure-cli-config

I totally respect that, and Clojure could invest more in offering frameworks or even no-code platforms or such features, but the truth is it doesn't. The language very much targets the software/information engineer category in my opinion, where by that I mean, the people who are interested in not just the functional requirements, but also the non-functional requirements of performance, scale, architectural runway, future extensibility, operations, maintainability, correctness, re-usability, etc. Especially, Clojure targets those who believe a balance between all these and functional requirements is the holy grail. That's why it won't be the most correct, the most performant, the most productive, but a pragmatic balance of all these in almost equal parts.

Maybe it should also embrace the people looking to get a product out by simply using a framework, and I'd say there's more of that in Clojure today than ever before, but the community I think is more composed of the former people that I describe, which is why you don't see any attempted framework take hold in the community, because most current members are not in the group that "just want to build the product using an established framework".

I think the community has settled, ounce again, on a bit of a balanced approach, Kit (https://github.com/kit-clj/kit) and Edge (https://github.com/juxt/edge) are such hybrids. And some more direct viable frameworks have come along like Biff (https://biffweb.com/) and Fulcro (https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/).

That said, since the community is more composed of people like me, you don't see a mass move of every Clojurian switching to one of those.

So it creates some questions?

1. Is it a problem that the language targets engineers more interested in a balance between non-functional and functional?

2. Should it be mutually exclusive, or can Clojure equally serve both niche? And if so, should it, why?

3. Is the claim that you can be as productive and it is just as easy to build a product without using a framework in Clojure true? Does this apply to everyone, or only certain personalities or people with certain amount of lower level knowledge?

4. Is Clojure's marketing misleading? Are people looking to just "build the product using an established framework" mislead in thinking Clojure will offer them salvation?

5. Where do most developer fall in, if they don't fall in the category Clojure currently targets, than does that mean Clojure cannot become mainstream? To go mainstream does it mean you have to target frameworks because there are more developers looking to just make a product using a framework?

I don't have answers to these, I'm just trying to define the current state and what the problem with it might be, or if it even is a problem.

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