alt Hacker News> I'm not sure a framework is really going to change that onboarding process, or help with network effects that much
having one commonly accepted and recommended way does improve onboarding, because it collapses the decision space beginners face. right now they are supposed to make decisions (not even directly, but just through selecting one of the many frameworks) about things like:
1. which project templating tool to use? (lein, clj-new, neil)
2. which dependencies management tooling to use? (lein, deps)
3. which build tooling to use? (lein, tools build, boot)
4. which web server? (jetty, httpkit, undertow)
5. which routing library? (pedestal, reitit)
6. which templating engine? (hiccup, rum, selmer)
7. how to deal with javascript and it's build tooling? (clojurescript with a host of it's own decisions, bolt ts/js and wire it yourself, dodge that completely with htmx)
yes, multiple frameworks exist that make those choices for you, but then you inevitably hit the problem that some of the components haven't been updated in a while, so documentation is out of date and when you try updating it just for your project you need to fix the framework plumbing and due to number of frameworks, the corpus of useful information on the internet is quite fragmented and the community help is limited, and on and on.
none of this is good beginner experience.
and don't get me wrong, choice by itself isn't bad, focus on composability of smaller libraries is important, dominant framework is not going to improve anything when it locks people into bad decisions.
what we lack is convergence behind a single "reference stack" of libraries that ought to be good enough for the general case and a minimal framework of plumbing that doesn't require dozens of files just to get started.
there doesn't need to be a single way of doing it, but there needs to be a single recommended way of doing it.
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.