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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there’s a minimum developer quality that’s needed when using a language like Clojure, without static typing, and with a wealth of idioms and best practices that need to be followed and libraries that need to be known.

Without it it’s a matter of time before the codebase can’t be developed anymore and the software doesn’t work as intended.

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I would love to see how Clojure's "wealth of idioms and best practices that need to be followed and libraries that need to be known" compare to almost any other popular language. Clojure is by far the simplest most straightforward language I've ever used with very few details and gotcha's that need to be memorized.

I can appreciate that. I'm on a journey this last year or so with Elixir, which also has an elevator pitch of "consistency" and "simplicity", true to a couple of defining principles, rather than hodge podge of committee like language initiatives.

But does it really matter now days? If you're doing anything web oriented, you don't get to abstract the hot mess that is web programming away. You still have to learn a ton of nuanced stacks, many couched in idioms that were established decades ago, and perservere today, wrapped in layers of whatever.

I think Go, for all its flaws, is an example of a language where mediocre developers can be more successful.

Java would be another.

well i agree you need developers who are on the senior side but thinking about data and pipelines, multi methods etc, makes for a quite extensible, large, applications.

the fact that because of the repl the happy path is always tested while being built and with clojure spec you can secure the edges, it is quite scalable.

i love static typing and rust in general but with web applications, the problem space is really a distributed concurrency problem of dynamic data. and clojure is basically tailor made for that.

You could replace Clojure with Python or Perl, and this Would honestly be even more true.

Yes and actually this happens often that a project is moved to another language because of maintainability, especially when a key person leaves the company.

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