Whatever the benefits of Clojure are, they were enough for Nathan Marz and first contributors to write Storm in it and succeed. Note that it's not an argument about impossibility of writing something like that in Java (see Spark, Flink, Heron, etc). But at that exact moment in time, a Clojure Storm was created and became useful to many people for years. There were many more Java programmers than Clojure programmers then and now, yet the Java coomunity didn't produce their own Storm first.
It doesn't. There are plenty of Clojure projects out there and nobody's rewriting them in other languages. There are also plenty of companies nowadays that have been using Clojure for years. The feedback from them is overwhelmingly positive.
Rewrites between languages keep happening in all kinds of permutations. I think pessimism or optimism from just headlines and announcements is more about what you read into it.
It reminds me of the “why we switched from Mongo to X” or “why we switched from Ruby to Y” trends some years ago.
I saw Clojure become popular long before it was ready for the limelight: it definitely wasn’t pragmatism driving it. It was a fetish for syntax and paradigm.
I think it’s very difficult to motivate going out of your way to hire decent devs that know clojure and java only to throw away the clojure some time down the road.
Begs the question, why not just write it in Java? Then at least its more likely to be a refactor down the road rather than a rewrite.
I think clojure ought to be a production ready language that scales well. That’s what it was designed to be. However lisp seems to dichotomise devs into those that get it and those that don’t and thus alienates many would be team members.
I think it speaks of something.