[darksaints]

Percentages don't create software, people do. Absolute numbers are definitely more important for ecosystems. I'd wager that for every 1 clojure dev with 20+ years experience, Java has 100.

I'd always consider language power to be an amplifier of experience...a 20+ year veteran that knows clojure like the back of his hand is going to be more productive than a java dev of similar experience. But the community size gap is huge. I deal with this as a scala programmer quite a bit. The ecosystem is pretty great for how small it is, but it's never going to be as good as java devs have it.

[yogthos]

You can directly leverage everything from Java and Js ecosystems with Clojure. So, I'm not sure I follow the argument here. If a useful library comes out, I can still use it from Clojure while enjoying the benefits of a much better language.

[saosebastiao]

You were the one to make the comparison to other JVM developers. Not sure why you would make the comparison if your whole point was that you can use both.

Of course that point is spurious at best. Clojure devs can use java libraries about as well as java devs can use C libraries: it's an unidiomatic nightmare with tons of unsafe sharp edges. And java devs can even use clojure libraries, but they don't and probably never will. Using java libs from scala is a hell of a lot easier than using them from java, but I still avoid them like the plague. If we're comparing the relative merits of ecosystems for different languages, it makes sense to compare the ecosystems developed natively in that language, not lumping in the thousands of other ecosystems that technically can interop with it.

My point is that the clojure ecosystem is weak in comparison to other more popular languages because experience in absolute quantities matter far more than percentages. The Arc ecosystem basically consists of a single 20+ year veteran, Paul Graham. That's 100% veteran composition. According to your line of argument, they surely must have the world's greatest programming language ecosystem. Does it?

At best, the clojure ecosystem can claim to be good enough for most uses. That's certainly a lot better than the vast majority of languages. I'd be overjoyed if SML, Pony, MiniZinc, or Mercury had the ecosystem that clojure enjoys. But compared to Javascript, Java, Python, C++, C, Javascript, Swift, Ruby, etc., it's not even close.

[yogthos]

Clojure was designed to be a hosted language from the start, and it embraces the underlying ecosystem. There are plenty of Clojure libraries that use Java libraries internally and provide an idiomatic API. Having a mature ecosystem to lean on is just practical. For example, take a look at Apache MX Net bindings, HTTP Kit, clj-http, clj-pdf, and so on. All these libraries leverage the host ecosystem. There's absolutely no value in reinventing the wheel here. And the interop nightmare you're imagining simply doesn't exist in practice.

>My point is that the clojure ecosystem is weak in comparison to other more popular languages because experience in absolute quantities matter far more than percentages.

And yet in 8 years of working with Clojure I have yet to run into a situation where the ecosystem failed me.

>But compared to Javascript, Java, Python, C++, C, Javascript, Swift, Ruby, etc., it's not even close.

And Clojure leverages both Java and Javascript ecosystems directly. The whole ClojureScript ecosystem is based around React. When you write web apps you build them on top of React components, and other Js libraries. And this is how seamless interop is:

https://github.com/yogthos/semantic-ui-example/blob/master/s...

The ecosystem is not an interesting problem to solve. Interesting things are happening in the code you write. The business logic of your application is where the language matters. Even when interop is unsafe you're doing it at the edges of the application, and you treat it the same way as you would any side effect.