> ...had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers.
To be fair the community itself, as humans, was very welcoming to newcomers. Really super nice and helpful folks.
If anything was "hostile" it was the dominance of emacs and very limited options for other tooling. That, and the horrifically unhelpful leaky abstractions in the stack trace when something went wrong. It's a big step, if you don't already know emacs to learn emacs (at a fairly advanced level) AND a new very different programming language.
I see now there's a vscode option with Calva. I haven't tried it. Might do that someday. Really wanted to like this language!
If anything was "hostile" it was the dominance of emacs and very limited options for other tooling. That, and the horrifically unhelpful leaky abstractions in the stack trace when something went wrong. It's a big step, if you don't already know emacs to learn emacs (at a fairly advanced level) AND a new very different programming language.
I see now there's a vscode option with Calva. I haven't tried it. Might do that someday. Really wanted to like this language!