Isn't Clojure overkill for small web apps?

The only two “frameworks” I’m aware of for Clojure are Coast and Luminus and even the latter is really just a project template that composes several libraries.

Luminus is more popular, by far, than Coast, but I don’t consider Luminus to be beginner-friendly. I don’t know much about Coast but my understanding is that it’s written by a Rubyist who wanted something Rails-like in Clojure.

The reality is that people just don’t use frameworks in Clojure and, for the most part, they don’t build “mostly CRUD stuff” with Clojure – so that’s a bit of a bare spot that beginners really notice when they come from other languages that either focus on or at least heavily support “mostly CRUD stuff”.

What Rails and Phoenix etc offer has no parallel in Clojure. See this massive ClojureVerse thread about what beginners struggle with and you’ll see quite a few posts about the lack of easy web app stuff.

I’ve been using Clojure for a decade in production at this point and I doubt I would use it for hobby web apps that are mostly forms, validation, and database access. I’m not sure what I would use, to be honest. I don’t like Ruby as a language but I might consider Rails, or I might look to PHP or Python for something quick and dirty out of the box – but it would mostly depend on what tech was easiest for wherever I wanted to host this.

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