I have not investigated Coast yet. I know it aims to be a Rails for Clojure... maybe it is, and maybe it would meet my needs.
But given the incredible power and expressiveness of Clojure, I find no reason to believe that the best rapid web development framework could be developed in Clojure if the right motivated people attempted to do so.
I don't know how many people (Plataformatec?) were behind Phoenix, but even in its early versions it was comparable to Rails. In some ways, it was even better.
There seem to be two obstacles to doing this in Clojure. The first is that people who actually know enough about Clojure to do this are actually very busy (happily) doing Clojure for work. They don't have the personal need to build a Rails for Clojure. The second is that those who would be capable already know how to pick and choose the libraries and build their own (even better, more suited for the purpose) ad-hoc frameworks for their projects.
I suppose it could be a curse of the power of Clojure that the lack of language pain points lessened the need/motivation for experts to build their own RAD framework.
I'm not denying that something better than Rails can be built with Clojure, just implying that it doesn't exist, so for quickly pushing out a CRUD webapp multiple times without repeating yourself again and again(avoiding all the trivial/tedious stuff), there is Rails.
Yes, and this trend in the Clojure ecosystem unfortunately works against widespread adoption. Works-for-me, everything-is-a-snowflake reinforces the image of Lisps being creative tools for individual artisans rather than rapid development tools for teams.
But given the incredible power and expressiveness of Clojure, I find no reason to believe that the best rapid web development framework could be developed in Clojure if the right motivated people attempted to do so.
I don't know how many people (Plataformatec?) were behind Phoenix, but even in its early versions it was comparable to Rails. In some ways, it was even better.
There seem to be two obstacles to doing this in Clojure. The first is that people who actually know enough about Clojure to do this are actually very busy (happily) doing Clojure for work. They don't have the personal need to build a Rails for Clojure. The second is that those who would be capable already know how to pick and choose the libraries and build their own (even better, more suited for the purpose) ad-hoc frameworks for their projects.
I suppose it could be a curse of the power of Clojure that the lack of language pain points lessened the need/motivation for experts to build their own RAD framework.