State of Clojure Survey 2019 Analysis
Tempting to interpret this as the last major issue in Clojure use (error messages) being resolved with the introduction of spec. Consensus on concerns seem to be dissolving away from runtime issues to softer community management issues (&quot;documentation&quot;, which is very context specific, and &quot;startup time&quot; which is important but precisely not an issue while running Clojure).<p>I do suspect that the survey is under-weighting how much beginners must struggle to navigate setting up CLASSPATH. If you don&#x27;t come to Clojure from Java then the toolchain is a bit intimidating with whatever a Maven is, followed by a process of trying to follow what both Java and Clojure tools are doing. This is one area Clojure compares very poorly with, eg, C (similarly awful setup process, but usually all the burden is shouldered by the distribution provider) or Python (use pip).<p>It is interesting coming at Clojure from a Debian background at how resistant Leiningen has been to being integrated into the Debian apt archive. I think the package was removed in 2014 and only came back in 2018; so still isn&#x27;t in the most recent stable. Given that Leiningen is itself probably the first choice of tool to manage dependencies, this raises questions about the technical underbelly of the tools used to build Clojure programs.