edge VS paos

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.

Just library-driven-development.

I used the paos library (https://github.com/xapix-io/paos). Mainly followed the quick start examples on the github page. Fetched the wsdl from the API provider, pulled out the SOAP envelope which translates into a Clojure map. The API provider has a bunch of soap services that each provide a large number of keys in the envelope but many keys in many services aren't capable of actually doing anything server-side. This was . . . documented poorly.

We have dev and test environments for this specific API provider so I hacked around and made calls until I had everything working.

This is a perfect example of the kind of one-off stuff I often use Clojure for. Quick prototypes to get work done. There are many groups in my larger organization and a common experience for me is to have groups tell you "X can't be done because Y." In this case, a vendor was charging 5 figure fees per data migration effort for each planned migration. The plan was to roll out by group and there are many groups. My immediate question was "can't we do this with the API and save these fees?" The answer was "no, not possible." About three days later I had a working version for this admittedly simple use case, demo'd it, rolled it into production. The cost savings will be in the low six figures. Of course, once it was working the original internal group came back to re-implement the project in another language because "bus factor" but tbh there is lots of weirdness in my larger employer organization about who gets to do what. Once I had shown we could do it relatively easily, teams come out of the woodwork to grab it so that they can add the cost savings to their yearly brag results.

I could write for days about this type of thing . . .