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by backpackway 2578 days ago
While I am big fan of Clojure and even more ClojureScript...

The problem is: Once an ecosystem is stagnating or on the decline it's a huge risk to enter this space. It's not just your own market value you might be destroying, it's hard to find resources and to scale development.

Besides this, what I really want is strong competition between lib authors in order to keep the ecosystem evolving. Even current blockbusters like React face problems in this regard, like the react-router monopoly where maintainer Michael Jackson buys competitors from the market to keep his leadgen machine running. I know this is OT but a language without a huge OR trending ecosystem is worthless.

2 comments

I think what you are stating is that the Clojure ecosystem is stagnating. I'm moving more and more of our company's stack over to the Clojure ecosystem because I see a lot of innovation and excitement in it. More importantly, it takes fewer people to be more productive in it.

I know some high-profile people have left the language for various reasons, but there are lots of people I know personally who are joining it. We should expect some churn.

I won't try to convince you that it isn't stagnating, but I want to put out an alternate perspective from someone who is investing a lot in the ecosystem.

> I know this is OT but a language without a huge OR trending ecosystem is worthless.

Anecdotally speaking, I'm not sure I agree that the Clojure ecosystem is stagnating (it's relatively small and likely always will be) but a big draw of ClojureScript is the way it piggy backs on the Node/NPM community.

I recently spun up a React/Reagent UI paired with a Clojurescript node.js server. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to do ClojureScript <--> JS interop in Shadow-Cljs projects.