As cool of a language as clojure might be, bad tooling is bad UX. Bad UX makes for a bad product. I don't care how many amazing features a language has, without great tools, it sucks.
PHP is a terrible language in terms of design, but deploys are ridiculously easy, and refreshing a page is near instantaneous. There are plenty of other things to complain about with PHP, but part of its popularity is the relatively pleasant experience with the main tools.
Extrapolating from the post that Clojure tooling is bad seems like a strange conclusion. I'm actually surprised that such a narrow post would find this much interest on HN.
Clojure deploys are pretty ridiculously easy - and refreshing pages on a Clojure based web stack is also instantaneous.
Seriously, Leiningen is great tooling. On pretty much every axis except startup speed I prefer it to everything else I've needed to use for work in other languages (Python, Ruby, and Node.js).
Hear, hear. I long for the day that lein and cljs tooling can replace bower/npm/grunt/gulp entirely. And I came to Clojure(Script) from JS, not Java, still have no clue what maven or pom.XML even means, but lein obviates all of that.
The main criticism I'd make, and this is something the boot (http://boot-clj.com) guys have mentioned (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeGenerationIsaDesignSmell), is that we are getting pretty dependent on code generation with lein templates, and they are getting increasingly larger and more complex just to handle our base scenarios (dev/prod builds, REPL, live reload). Maybe this is unavoidable, or not really an issue... I don't know.
I started using Django, as a relative newbie to python, back in 0.96, and it was a real pain in the ass to deploy. It took me a couple of days, minimum, all the while knowing I could have things halfway done in PHP.
Luckily I was given a stellar recommendation, and I stuck with it.
Django deploys now? Incredibly easy on the hosts I use (DO / Heroku). I expect Clojure to be the same in a year or so.
FWIW, I'm just starting to learn clojure. And just barely starting--these problems aren't annoying me yet.
> I expect Clojure to be the same in a year or so.
I'd say it was there years ago. On Heroku you can deploy any Clojure project that specifies a ":main" namespace. Deploying Clojure to a VPN is no different to any other language that runs behind an nginx proxy.
I disagree that the post can be summarized as bad tooling - leiningen is really great stuff - great tooling with a great UX (lein xyz for almost everything I need to do). I wish every language had something like leiningen.
PHP is a terrible language in terms of design, but deploys are ridiculously easy, and refreshing a page is near instantaneous. There are plenty of other things to complain about with PHP, but part of its popularity is the relatively pleasant experience with the main tools.