[taeric]

It is amusing, because the very thing that leads to stability is among the things that causes people to claim ecosystems like CL have gone "stagnant."

Similarly, TeX shows the halmarks of stability. I can reliably rebuild any document I've ever written. However, that means that the styles I used to use to write documents have to still be supported. Contrast that with HTML, where they constantly give new methods to do something because they changed their mind about how it should be done. Worse, they no longer support the old ways, because they were supposedly "never supported."

I think there is some merit to change driving progress. It is just frustrating when so much change is effectively user hostile.

[erlongsb]

Yea, that was my impression about the CL ecosystem and clojure made me rethink that. Nowadays it's pretty much the other way around for me - CL serves as an example of how clojure could keep dying and still be a useful tool for years to come

[jwhitlark]

I think part of the point of clojure is a hosted, small core, programmable programming language can't really die, it would just be dormant and could spring back whenever someone needed it.

It's weird to me when people claim clojure is dying, yet the ecosystem is evolving rapidly and people are making money with it. It's not a model that's easy to starve, it's too lightweight to collapse under it's own load, and there's no way to kill it, so how is it dying?

Mindshare ebbs and flows, but being THE programming language was never clojure's goal.

[taeric]

I think most of the crowd claiming that clojure is dying are those that feel that way by virtue of it being a lisp. And, oddly, most habits in most languages tend for them to pull more and more into them such that they are all looking for an uber language.

[jwhitlark]

You might be right. I do think that by being intentionally hosted, it avoids a number of traditional lisp problems. If it was a stand alone implementation, I wouldn't be nearly as bullish on it.