[astrashe2]

This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly.

There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure.

Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard.

That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it.

I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.

[hluska]

People posting the wrong information is a great opportunity for a community to explain why it’s wrong. We lost that take on community and it’s a major loss for our entire industry. It’s remarkably hard for people to figure out why they’re wrong when they’re wrong.

I don’t think the solution is the Usenet-esque “you are wrong and your breeding is suspect” way. But there’s a very good place in the middle and I’d really like to find that place.

Business wise, I think we’re using the wrong paradigm in some major places. Maybe we can beat that while I’m still alive and that would be a net win for our whole craft.