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From Clojure to Ruby

by olieidel on 6/13/22, 7:57 PM with 3 comments

• by jacobobryant on 6/14/22, 12:20 AM

  > Like, there isn’t a full-blown web framework in Clojure - because that would require the web framework developers to make a whole lot of decisions, and Clojure library people prefer not to impose their decisions on their fellow developers. [...] > > Getting stuff done will require decisions to be made, and those come with trade-offs. Like, if you want to enable your users to build a web app, you’ll have to choose the routing library beforehand. You’ll also decide on how to serve static files, how to handle HTML templates, and to serve JSON on your API. > > Clojure people would protest. This is tightly coupled! Too opinionated! Too much magic!

  I too ran into the lack-of-a-web-framework problem, so I ended up building one[1]. When I started, I also thought there would be idealogical opposition and I'd have to convince people that frameworks can be good. But in fact there have been a lot of positive reactions (including funding!), and I honestly can't think of a single time when someone said something to the effect of "but frameworks are bad!" (maybe if you searched r/clojure you could find something).

  Based on that, I think the reason there isn't a widely used Ruby-on-Rails equivalent is simply because no one's put in the work yet to make it happen (though I am trying to!). I think it's likely that a lot of the people in the Clojure community historically just haven't needed a Rails-like framework, either because they prefer piecing it together themselves or because they've been working in domains that don't involve spinning up new web apps very often.

  [1] https://biffweb.com