TL;DR

Lets focus on concrete problems and how to solve them.

Show which problem Clojure/Script already solves wonderfully.

Discuss what we could do to build the tooling and libs that are missing, starting with listing what is missing.

Lets showcase more of our accomplishments, and promote how awesome they are, and how quick it was to make them.

Lets list things non committers (people not allowed to contribute to open source) can do to help out with the above. (so that I can start helping out )

bbrinck: bbrinck: A one-liner that starts a fully-featured REPL outside of any project. A small set of tools (ideally with few deps to reduce loading time) would come standard. This would be useful for beginners and for one-off explorations. A similarly named library that could be included in dev profiles that sets up the same tools in a lein or boot REPL. When a beginner decides to switch to a project REPL, the transition should be easy.

Ya, I think extending clj and nRepl would be best for these. I don’t know if the clj tool is open for community contributions, or has any intention of becoming a very powerful repl which could have all these advanced features. I do hope so, I’d love the standard install of clojure to come with a clj command line repl that would have source highlight, auto-complete, pretty error messages, etc. The one with 1.9 is already a huge improvement on what came before. Now it just needs to support Windows and be bundled in more linux standard package managers.

Same thing could be done to nRepl, so boot and lein would all get those features.

ivanreese: ivanreese: Those languages all still exist, but they aren’t thriving.

But that’s rhetorical to my question. What about them makes it they are “not thriving”? Why would people come to a language that isn’t thriving? If we say people arn’t coming to Clojure, then Clojure isn’t thriving? So what about Clojure isn’t thriving and needs to be improved? Its just back to the chicken and egg.

I’d rather we measured Clojure/Script by merit, and not number of users. If we were able to build more impressive things in Clojure/Script, at a faster pace then other languages. If we had amazing libraries, one for everything imaginable. Then the language would be thriving. Maybe people choose to come to it, or they don’t, and then its really their loss and Paul Graham is correct to say just be happy you’ll be beating the average.

Currently, I feel what we all really care about is having a better language and ecosystem for ourselves. We think more people coming to Clojure/Script will mean better language and ecosystem, but I think we’re mistaken, and that’s also a dead end, because of the chicken and egg problem. If the language and ecosystem is not already excellent, no one will come.

That’s why if we put aside the goal of bringing people in, and focused on improving the ecosystem and language, I think we can achieve our goal of a better language and ecosystem faster and more effectively, and as a side effect, it will bring more people in, and if they come in to a culture that is continuously focused on improving its language and ecosystem, they’ll get motivated to do the same, and the growth could be exponential.

Right now, people come to Clojure/Script, and what they see, if you look at Clojureverse, is a bunch of other people complaining about why not enough people use Clojure and how we can bring more people to Clojure/Script. What they should see is: “How to do X with Y”, “How to improve Z”, “Roadmap to F”, “What’s new”, “How I built this amazing thing in less then a week”, etc.