Why did they converge on something so, apparently, great, in such a low amount of time? And why is this so hard for Clojure?
Not taking sides or trying to be negative, just honestly curious what the driving factor is.
In Clojure, you can make a website many other ways, use any existing Java server, implement your own server quickly, use any templating language you want, implement your own quickly, use whatever routing lib you want, implement your own quickly, etc.
Not only are there existing options from Java, but implementing your own is approachable to your average dev, and can be done in a reasonably short amount of time.
Maybe it's a bit of the Lisp curse afterall. A language too productive, that no one bothers settling for the one framework.
I also think Elixirs Ruby friendly syntax brought in a lot of Rubyists with Rails experience, and that attracted people who used Rails to Phoenix, giving it that inertia.
Chris McCord used to be a Rails developer, so he came directly from Rails, so it made sense to rebuild a similar framework for Elixir, and a lot of people followed from Rails to Elixir as a better ruby with better scaling.
If you adopted Elixir, you most likely were starting from scratch, a green field project. Since Erlang is already great at concurrent distributed systems, Elixir's niche became web application development, and it didn't have much existing libraries or frameworks to leverage, so I think it makes more sense for an initial popular framework to come to existence and rally others around.
It still built on Erlang fundamentals, its web server is Cowboy for example, but there wasn't much on top to help with other parts of a web app.
The thing is, many (most?) developers are interested in building the end product, not building or heavily researching the ideal framework/library/stack itself. Without something easy to use, widely understood, and that has all the pieces hooked together, a lot of developers will get frustrated and seek different pastures so they can just concentrate on a product. That's why Rails and other similar libraries in other languages are so successful and make those languages successful, because a key layer is handled for you so you can just get higher-level work done.
I used Clojure many years full-time and liked so many things about it, but the myriad ways to do the same thing does not appeal to everyone. This also extends to other aspects of the language -- the many different development environments and tooling, hooking together all the various ways to actually write, develop Clojure code. Many developers also don't want a lot of their time spent building a development workflow.
That means, throwing a scaffolded template and a prefab framework might be good for an initial proof of concept and v0 testing the market launch, but with Clojure you can often deliver POCs and v0s just as fast, but then have the flexibility to grow it as it needs too, where frameworks often become big drag on what you can do and how quickly you can do so as you need to grow the product.
Basically, the inner working matters to the end product, especially when products don't have an end, but are really a lifetime of support and continued changes in feature-set and compatibility/scale.
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, then 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.
A conventional framework doesn't fit Clojure particularly well, so the community has been forced to tread new ground to figure out what works with the language.
I haven't dug into Clojure enough, but I'm curious why you think a conventional MVC-style framework wouldn't be a good fit (not that the article is making this argument).
I view Elixir as two languages in one: an actor language, and a functional programming language. Sometimes you gotta use the actor language (processes) to model behavior, but it's far better to leave that to the FP aspects.
The problem with using processes is there are a lot of concerns that only they can handle.
To be fair, I'm only a hobbyist Elixir dev. But there's lots of misinformation about how easy Elixir makes certain things. In my experience, it's not easy to build a process tree that factors in concurrency and synchronization, much less fault tolerance on top of that. Nevermind performance and gc isolation. Adding modelling on top of that just makes the job way harder.
The only real thing processes have in common with objects is they both hold state. Messages are kinda similar to methods if you squint hard enough, but there's more differences than similarities. Everything else listed above has nothing in common with any given object in your average object oriented programming language.
I kind of implied all of that, but I was specifically referring to the concept of modules and all its feature-sets, which together, in my opinion, does lead to a more OO like style of programming, especially structs, processes, behaviors and use, those things I feel are really similar to classes and inheritance. And there's also the dotted syntax for both map and struct access.
While yes, it's different than your common OO, in practice, you end up using these things similarly.
In Pheonix, simply put, almost all extension points relies on the __using__ macro, __MODULE__ compile time macro and use keyword. So it ends up very similar to an OOP framework, you basically extend classes, but you do so by using `use` instead of using `extend`, and a macro that copies over code and dynamically set the module name, instead of having an inherited lookup table.
How it's achieved is very different, but as a user of Pheonix, the ergonomics end up very similar.
Look at this:
defmodule TodoWeb.ItemsController do
use TodoWeb, :controller
alias Todo.Items
def index(conn, _params) do
items = Items.list_items()
render(conn, "index.html", items: items)
end
end
package TodoWeb;
import Todo.Items;
class ItemsController extends TodoWebController
public index(conn, params) {
var items = Items.listItems();
this.render(conn, "index.html", items);
}
}
And TodoWebController similary uses Phoenix.Controller, etc. It gives you a very similar feel to an inheritance tree, and pluging-in behavior in the framework by class extension.
Namespaces in Clojure really don't have this feel to them at all, now maybe you could shenaningan something similar with some similar macro convention over namespaces in Clojure, but it definitely isn't encouraged by the language or community the way it is in Elixir.
So in general, I feel modules in Elixir have a much closer feel to them to classes/objects in OO languages, and you end up using them similarly, where-as that's not the case for Clojure namespaces.
In most languages, related data is generally represented by some manner of closed record, struct or object. In Clojure, this data is represented by open maps instead.
This distinction may seem minor or even irrelevant, but in my view it's the key difference between Clojure and other languages, and the reason why the MVC pattern has never quite fit comfortably in Clojure.
In a language that uses closed records, complex data tends to align itself in terms of fixed hierarchies. Think of how the models in Rails are typically laid out. You have a few dozen models, with a handful of fields each, arranged in some sort of static tree or graph.
In Clojure, data doesn't tend to align itself in the same way. Data doesn't need to be artificially grouped if there's no benefit in doing so; its structure can be much more amorphous.
There's a similar problem at the "view" end. REST tends to assume a hierarchy of resources, when that may not be the best way for the client to get the data it wants, or for the server to represent the data.
I'm curious, just because Clojure offers that flexibility to a developer when writing the logic in their app, why does this flexibility need to "interfere" (for lack of a better word) with the design of a web framework?
Is Clojure unique here? seems this is the norm for Javascript applications too, that are done mostly with a FP style, instead of open clojure maps you have open JS objects. Most JS SDKs and libraries I have work with is just passing JS objects between them and your code.
So you’re mostly rewarded by keeping object «types» seperate
For example, you don't have to store functions in objects in Javascript, but the language design encourages it. This is problematic because we can't pull data out of an object without considering the functions that rely on it.
Another issue is that keys are not unique. Two objects might contain an "id" key, for example, that identifies them in different ways. This is problematic if you want to arbitrarily merge objects together.
Idiomatic Javascript might look like this:
user.orders.total_cost()
Orders.total_cost(user["user/orders"]);
The more you force rigid categorisations and behaviour on data, the harder it is to manipulate and organise in different ways. In-memory data is almost always ordered with a hierarchical structure, because that's what closed records gravitate toward. But if we take a look at databases, its rare to find any organised along strict hierarchical lines.
Don't exactly understand this part, if one of your objects has its unique identifier as "userID" and the other as "invoiceID" you can merge them without conflict or what I'm missing? "id" is indeed use widely in blog examples/tutorials and even books but it's not the norm for enterprise data.
Also relevant as a Phoenix-like alternative for Clojure: https://github.com/tatut/ripley