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Re:Brett Slatkin: Why am I building a new functional program... by xiaq on Sunday March 05, 2023 @11:40AM (#35031177)
As someone who's dabbled in Clojure: the project manager scene (lein vs boot vs deps CLI) is not nearly as bad it is may seem. They are different project runners, but they are very similar in their core job of managing package dependencies. If you're a beginner, you can choose any one and there's very little you're missing out.

In comparison, the JavaScript ecosystem is much, much more divided. There are different ways to write modules, different ways to build them, different package repositories, etc..

Re:Brett Slatkin: Why am I building a new functional program... by moring on Sunday March 05, 2023 @11:57AM (#35031390)
> If you're a beginner, you can choose any one

I found this to be false in practice: I did choose any one (lein actually, because my IDE suggested that it's the one you'll want to use when you don't know better). The consequence was that the examples from the Clojure page didn't work and/or printed totally different output, because they made a different choice.

It's the kind of thing where a Clojure expert would say: they are different tools, of course their output is different, but it doesn't matter because that's only the tool output and the net effect is the same. But in practice, a newbie will struggle solving very simple problems because the tutorial doesn't match reality.

Contrast that with the "rust book" (more or less the official tutorial) in which every single example behaves 100% exactly as described in the tutorial, from installing the toolchain to very complex, language-specific issues (yes, of course I'm referring to the borrow checker).