What Clojure needs to grow — a boring web framework and boring data science

Eric Normand argues that Clojure needs boring, standard web frameworks and data science libraries to attract mainstream adoption.

►► Audio, Video, and Transcript available: lispcast.com/clojure-needs-grow-boring-web-framework-boring-… ►► Subscribe on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/thoughts-on-functional-programmi… I think a lot about what Clojure needs. Is there something that is sort of the bottleneck for growth? People talk about different things as their hypotheses for what would make it grow. I think that what Clojure needs -- I'll talk about my hypotheses -- I think what we really need is to solve all of the boring problems that other languages have already solved. Transcript Hello, my name is Eric Normand and these are my thoughts on functional programming. As you probably know, I am invested in #Clojure and I want to see the Clojure community to grow, for reasons which you can probably guess, so I'm not going to go into that. I think a lot about what Clojure needs. Is there something that is sort of the bottleneck for growth? People talk about different things as their hypotheses for what would make it grow. I think that what Clojure needs -- I'll talk about my hypotheses -- I think what we really need is to solve all of the boring problems that other languages have already solved. What do I mean by that? We need a web framework. It needs to be a boring web framework. We need to solve...have a data science story; data science, machine learning, that kind of thing. It's possible to do it in Clojure. A lot of people have a lot of success with it, but in terms of, "use this thing and it just has everything you need," we don't have it. The reason I call it boring is that no one wants to just sit down and do the work. It's a lot of boring work to put together the libraries, make sure that they run in all the platforms, make the installation easy. People get very satisfied with getting it working on their machine and talking about how great the setup is, but then not writing it down anywhere or making it easy for other people so that what took them three hours to set up with a lot of background knowledge, someone could set up in 20 minutes with no knowledge. We just need boring, boring solutions to these problems. I used to think that we knew that killer app. I thought that we needed something that people would learn Clojure for. Regardless of their biases, or their previous experience with #functionallanguages they would jump to Clojure for this one killer thing that was going to solve all their problems and make their life easier. They wouldn't care about the syntax, how bad the error messages are. They wouldn't care about all these things that people complain about, because they just needed that thing. I'm now skeptical of that as a solution. If it hasn't happened already, then I don't think it's just going to happen. I don't have any good ideas for what that would be, this killer app. I've resigned myself, giving up that idea, "What do we need?" It's obvious if you just sit there. You give up th