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Comment by jkkramer | Hacker News Reader

The article's right that Clojure doesn't have a great newbie experience yet. However, the language and community is still very young:

  Clojure: 3 years old
  PHP: 15
  Java: 15
  Ruby: 15
  Python: 19
  Objective-C: 24

I think the fact that there are so many coders that want to try Clojure despite its young age speaks to how compelling and powerful it is. The slick user experience will catch up soon.

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I like how the newest language in your list was essentially created in the 60's and yet the oldest was created in the 80's. Makes my head hurt.

There're several twists.

While the syntax and theory has been around for a long time, a language still needs its own libraries, build/package management software, editor integration, etc.

But Clojure already came with a lot of functionality because it could interface with Java, and therefore its vast collection of code.

But, Clojure and Java styles are very different from each other, so using Java libraries can be noticeably different from using Clojure libraries.

I'm afraid clojure will not catch up just by getting older. Improving the installation experience should not be too difficult, but for a community supported language to have great documentation is a monumental task. Writing documentation is boring after all.

Your list suffers a little bit from selection bias. It doesn't include all the old languages that never caught on. There are of course many reasons why a language doesn't become popular and lack of good documentation and ease of getting started is probably not the most important one.

I mean, there's C++, the language that managed to become popular by doing everything wrong ;-)

I don't think this is a good argument, because eg CPython was the reference implementation of Python since day 1.

In other words, since the very very first day of python, people could tell a new python user to grab that one very specific package from python.org and go ahead until he is able to judge the different implementations out there, which solves precisely the problem mentioned in the article.

Same goes to an extent for Java and PHP.

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