I'd be curious to hear your take on web apps with Clojure vs Ruby vs ASP.NET MVC, since it sounds like you may actually have good experience with all three.
Haha, I guess I am unusually qualified to talk about those different domains. It's actually kind of funny - when I was interviewing with MSFT I begged and pleaded to get on the ASP.NET MVC team. I was previously a lead web developer and wrote a few different PHP frameworks back when rails was just starting to gain some popularity (and before anything good existed for PHP). So I thought I was made for that job, but apparently they thought the VS editor was a better fit ;)
So here's a list of my thoughts on the different communities:
Clojure: up and coming; very piecemeal (working on this here: https://github.com/ibdknox/noir); community very helpful and very responsive on issues; Clojure itself is beautiful; it's hard to beat DSLs built into the language, you can actually do everything (HTML, JS, CSS) in one language.
Ruby (Rails): now "grown up"; lots of different modules for virtually everything you can think of; convention over configuration taken a bit too far; takes a while to just get started; but somehow maintains a low barrier to entry.
ASP.NET MVC: hosting remains an issue, though appharbor is working on it; they've come a long way; roughly equivalent to rails now, except when it somes to gems; lack of large gem-like community hurts; solid tools;
I think ASP.NET MVC suffers not because of the framework itself, but because of the mentality of the MSFT community; they wait for MSFT to deliver the things they want. Compare that to most other language communities (Ruby, Python, Node.js, Clojure, etc) and you see the polar opposite: everyone is writing tons of modules/gems/packages to solve all sorts of problems. Going too extreme on that front can be a problem too. The Node.js community, for example, suffers a bit from the decision paralysis created by everyone building modules for the same things.
Ultimately I settled on Clojure because I think it is one of the most intelligently designed languages I've ever used. While The web-side of things is still very much in the formative stage, it's actually further along than most people think. My startup (http://www.typewire.io, built by me and NathanHammond) is now entirely clojure, but we originally started with node.js. Over time, I became frustrated with the fact that JS code doesn't scale up to large apps well (it becomes messy no matter how hard you try, especially with something as callback heavy as node) and it didn't perform nearly as well as we'd hoped. The result of our transition, however, was a much smaller, more efficient codebase built on top of DSL's that make generating content so much easier. Writing your html directly in manipulable clojure data structures opens up a world of possibilities that I simply didn't have using standard templating solutions that most other frameworks rely on. My hope is that I can show some of this to others and am working to solidify what Clojure webdev can look like with my micro-framework Noir: https://github.com/ibdknox/noir
In the end, there's a lot more for me to say here... it may be better for a blogpost or a real-life conversation. I'd be up for the latter if you'd like :)
