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- Because of a perfect balance between simplicity, elegance, and pragmatism. - Because of "true" REPL. Having to be able to evaluate any expression without any ceremony, right from your IDE, with one or a couple of keystrokes is remarkably liberating. No language I have tried gives me that enormous boost when prototyping things. Even refactoring existing code is much faster, because of the tightened feedback loop. Only Smalltalk comes close enough, sadly, Smalltalk has been dormant in years, and I don't think it ever comes back as a pragmatic choice to build a business upon. Whenever anyone retorts "Python has REPL, Ruby too, etc." - it is just sad to see their ignorance. One has to give a heartfelt try to understand what makes Lisp REPL so unique. - Because it is currently probably the best PL for building web-apps. You get real code-reuse, which even in NodeJS with JS/TS turned out to be an unfulfilled promise. You cannot merely share say data validation logic between back-end and front-end, even in NodeJS, let aside other languages. In Clojure, this turned out to be possible, even though you essentially might be running things on two completely different platforms - JVM and the browser. - Because you have access to tons of libraries. Java and Javascript interop from Clojure and Clojurescript is lovely. Why re-invent the wheel if someone has already done it? - Because of the fantastic community of genuinely inspiring, smart, and extremely friendly people. When you work with Clojure/Clojurescript, you always feel a step ahead of the crowd [working in other, more popular PLs]. So many things in different languages got inspiration from Clojure: destructuring, immutability, state management (redux, Elm), React hooks, etc. etc. And at the same time, Clojurists never feel shy and actively "borrow" good things from other languages, libraries, and tools. Clojure community of active members has probably fewer people than work for Google, but they generate and enhance so many awesome and cool ideas. |