edn

Few times I feel inclined to answer for a post. There are actually lots of posts that say that Clojure needs “the web framework” like Rails or Django or Phoenix so it’ll be better. Sometimes these ideas have value, sometimes don’t, and sometimes they are simply nonsense at all.

I recently was shown a post that was basically nonsense, and to keep things neutral, I’m not going to link it here. I want to expose why I think these ideas are nonsense, and how a person that’s new to Clojure could think about this lack of frameworks, how to handle this situation, and what to expect from the language.

So, first things first: Clojure is made to be a hosted language. Which means it expects you to use Java libraries, or Javascript ones, if you’re in ClojureScript. Sure, in Javascript things are more difficult mostly because of the weird ecosystem that expects everything to be transpiled first, but most of the time you can use interop just fine.

All this to say: you don’t need to wrap libraries. Most people I know, me included, said sometime that Clojure needs more libraries that wrap over other other things, and while I still would love to just stay on “Clojure-land” most of the time, it’s better to have a stable Java library that we can use over Clojure than an old, unstable, and severely lacking behind features that wrap the Java one to have a “Clojure feel”. Most of the time, you can have a “Clojure feel” with few lines of code anyway.
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