[snapey]

It hasn't fallen. The Clojure community has been growing steadily and continues to grow (it's a great community, I'll add). Things have just settled down since, that's why there are fewer announcement.

As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1].

Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

[dustingetz]

John deGoes said "Clojure developers ... consciously stay inside the Clojure community because they love the language and ecosystem" and I think that's pretty interesting – Clojure has like this event horizon where if you cross it, you become so attached to it that you never leave. It's like a little black hole that is already self-sustaining – it can only grow, it will never die, and it can happily wait for opportunity.

We think of hockey stick tech adoption curves as smooth exponentials, but that's not actually true. Hockey sticks demonstrate COMPLIMENT EFFECTS, which is where the latent potential for growth is suddenly activated by an external trigger. An example is broadband/youtube, described by VC Chris Dixon here: http://cdixon.org/2009/09/10/non-linearity-of-technology-ado... Another is smartphones and smartphone apps. Ruby/Rails. Scala/bigdata.

Our goal at http://www.hyperfiddle.net is to use the low-code movement to trigger complement effects in Clojure.

[tombert]

For me, I found Clojure after googling around for various of permutations of "CSP in function language" back in 2016 or so. I fooled around with core.async, thought it was pretty neat, but promptly forgot about it.

About a year later, I was doing a project where I felt a dynamic language would be useful, still wanted it to be pure-functional-ish, and tried Clojure, and this time started with the fundamentals, and once I got to macros, I was completely hooked on Lisp for forever.

I thought it was the coolest thing ever that I could add language features without having to understand compiler theory or anything like that.

=====

Nowadays, my work involves around 50% Java (yuck) and 50% Clojure, but a lot of my personal projects are done with Scheme, since I have to admit that I do kind of like the `define-syntax` macro system better than Clojure's.

I definitely see the "event horizon" analogy. Once you see just how much more productive you are with the language than most others, it's hard to leave.

[StreamBright]

It is becoming Kotlin/Bigdata fairly quickly.

[juskrey]

> As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1].

I am freelancing for Clojure projects for already 6 years and have to say it is true you can expect better compensation in general, but this is only given

1) You are an experienced coder overall, e.g. I am 18 years in dev, and Clojure is seen as a logical high level experience conclusion

2) You can find good existing Clojure project, which is damn hard, and the line of Clojure coders for openings is usually pretty long. And many businesses are expecting to find young coders who can be.. not so well paid. The latter is a very bad approach for Clojure projects (Sorry, young guys, I have seen tons of Clojure code by many people, and it only looks good when the coder is at least 30+)

3) You can find good greenfield tech agnostic project, where your sell point is, again, your overall experience first, Clojure second

But at the end, that all keeps you very fit in many dimensions, and I am not going to give up Clojure, instead investing more

[dominotw]

> Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java.

Thats true. I write clojure for living too.

But choice of programming languages in enterprises is not made by programmers.

[tombert]

It is indirectly; if a company has trouble hiring, they might switch up the stack a bit to try and attract new talent.

For example, my previous employer (Jet.com) used F# partly because one of the most senior engineers liked it, but also partly because they thought it might attract some tech talent out of the shadows.

[ken]

I've never heard of any company switching languages because they were having trouble hiring.

[the2bears]

Happened at a company I worked for. Anecdotal, but it happens.

[hota_mazi]

> As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1]

That's more an indication of scarcity than anything else. FORTRAN and COBOL programmers are also pretty well compensated.

Also, good luck getting any of these jobs.

[iLemming]

>Also, good luck getting any of these jobs.

When was the last time you've tried? I know a great deal of developers (including myself) working exclusively with Clojure and have never struggled finding a new gig.

[pixelperfect]

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job listings looking for junior developers, and when I do, they tend to be in Europe/Canada rather than the U.S.

[hota_mazi]

> Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless

That's a bit hard to believe.

Surely someone in this situation would settle with taking a job programming in a different language instead of going homeless?

It's also possible they placed unreasonable demands (I notice a lot of people looking for jobs in niche languages often ask to work 100% remotely too).

If you work in a niche language, you need to be ready to compromise in certain areas, such as having to relocate.

[pixelperfect]

https://twitter.com/porkostomus/status/1151595347157737472

I agree, if this person was acting entirely rationally they probably would have switched to learning JS and found a job by now. My only point is that there aren't many opportunities for junior-level Clojure developers who don't stand out as exceptional in some way.

[thrower123]

I am not overly familiar with Clojure, but is it possible to be expert at Clojure, and not be able to parlay that into some other JVM language job? It might be a bit depressing, but I would think that one could take a Java job in a pinch if one had one's back against the wall.

[pixelperfect]

I think anyone who's an expert in any general-purpose programming language can find a way to parlay that into a job, since it's much easier for them to learn another language, but knowing Clojure doesn't help much for learning other JVM languages. My guess is an expert C++ programmer could pick up Java faster than a Clojure programmer.

[WillPostForFood]

Is it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin.

https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failin...

https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language...

[htfu]

At least the first link has a pretty crazy cutoff though, 2018. Once a lib is mature it can easily go years without updates, doesn't mean development has been abandoned, much less usage.

But trying to compare across languages by package manager traffic or something would obviously be a lot harder.

In any case apparent zero velocity, whatever it's actually tracking, definitely shows that general interest (which constantly seems high) isn't really translating to really wide adoption.

[WillPostForFood]

I agree with your first point, and stability of Clojure the language, and libraries is a strength. But it does suggest fewer people are starting new projects with Clojure, which matches how it feels to me, and matches my experience in the Clojure community, where discussions are a little less active.

[yogthos]

I really don't understand why people obsesses over popularity so much. The only question worth asking is whether the language has a big enough community to be sustainable, especially when dealing with a hosted language that leverages the underlying ecosystem.

In case of Clojure the answer is unequivocally yes. It's got a large active community around it, and there are many companies of all kinds using it in production. Whether it's growing rapidly or slowly doesn't really affect its effectiveness compared to the other options available.

[WillPostForFood]

It has a small active community with many abandoned libraries, no killer app, and painful tooling. I like the language in spite of that, but size of community matters. To your point, as a hosted language you can make up Clojure's deficiencies by using Java libraries, but if you aren't a Java developer (or are a disgruntled Java developer) that isn't a great answer.

The only question worth asking is whether the language has a big enough community to be sustainable

Exactly, and I'd argue Clojure was on a path to yes, but has lost momentum and is leaning toward no.

[iLemming]

> It has a small active community

Wrong. Clojure community is only smaller in comparison to mainstream languages: Java, JS/TS, Python, Ruby, Go. Today it has more conferences than Haskell, F#, OCaml, Elm, Elixir, Erlang. More meetups and more podcasts. Just this year alone there were announcements for Clojure confs in India, Brazil, Canada, Russia and Belgium (and these are just for new ones)

> many abandoned libraries

Wrong. Clojure emphasizes modularity and composability, library that supposed to be doing one thing and well is usually just that. Besides, Clojure is also legendary for stability and backward-compatibility. I don't know any other language where you can pick a project of a few years old, update a few dependencies and still expect it to work. You don't have to re-write things every time TC39 gets browsers to support yet another Javascript feature. Read this passage from one of the Clojure libs https://github.com/candera/causatum#liveness-advisory to understand why Clojure libs don't get updated very often.

There are hundreds of Emacs packages that people still download and use but they haven't seen any updates for decades. Does that make them "abandoned"?

> no killer app

Wrong. Clojure often offers multiple choices for any domain. Being hosted makes it even broader. Yes, some knowledge of the language you're trying to interop with is required, but you don't have to be an expert to successfully build and maintain things. If someone doesn't qualify Figwheel, Re-frame, Fulcro, Lacinia, etc. as "killer apps" I don't know, maybe they are just pathologically ever unhappy.

> painful tooling

Wrong. Again. It used to be difficult, because only Emacs used to have nice support for Clojure. Today you can write Clojure in Emacs, IntelliJ, Atom, VSCode, Vim, Eclipse. And tooling is a lot nicer in comparison with other tech stacks.

So no, Clojure has never "lost the momentum". It is still growing, but less rapidly. The ecosystem has reached levels of hedonic adaptation, where people are just happily using it without too much excitement and/or frustration. Clojure has become a "boring" language. It just works. And arguably it is probably the best tool for what it is made for.

[slifin]

In the web domain these are killer apps for me, the kinds of thing you can't find in any? c or ml languages: Datomic cloud, Fulcro, Pathom, Datascript, EQL, hiccup, garden, honeySQL, Spec 2, CodeQ, hyperfiddle

I think it's because Clojure in general focuses on the value of things rather than the identity of things

[WillPostForFood]

Maybe conferences isn't a great metric there have been a bunch of cancellations like SYNC and Clojure West. People have already mentioned Incanter in this thread, one of many abandoned and out of date libraries. Lacinia is nice, but a killer app? What language doesn't have a GraphQL library? Have many partially supported editors doesn't make better tooling. Clojure still has potential, but by every other metric, besides conferences (

[yogthos]

The recent Clojure/north conference [1] focused specifically on commercial usage of Clojure with plenty of companies presenting why and how they're using Clojure to solve their business needs.

There are tons of new libraries and tools being built with Clojure every year. Some recent examples are Spectre, Crux, Metabase, Braid, Neanderthal, and many others.

Meanwhile, the tooling around Clojure is far better than vast majority of languages out there. Leiningen is a one stop shop for managing dependencies, testing, building, and packaging the application. Uberjars are effectively containers that you can drop on any system that has a JVM on it and run them. Compare this to the nightmarish tooling of Node, Python, or Ruby.

Furthermore, if you're doing web development then you get a single consistent setup with Clojure/Script, and once again benefit from superior tooling where you can reliably hot load code in the browser, something that simply doesn't work in Js, do code pruning down to function level, and minification including libraries.

There's a good reason that you rarely see companies switch from Clojure to other languages once they start using it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClJshc6QtMWRqIAwJy85sfA

[yogthos]

>It has a small active community with many abandoned libraries, no killer app, and painful tooling. I like the language in spite of that, but size of community matters. To your point, as a hosted language you can make up Clojure's deficiencies by using Java libraries, but if you aren't a Java developer (or are a disgruntled Java developer) that isn't a great answer.

All of this is demonstrably false as has already been discussed in the other reply.

>Exactly, and I'd argue Clojure was on a path to yes, but has lost momentum and is leaning toward no.

I don't know how you can argue that seeing how Clojure is used commercially by plenty of companies large and small nowadays. It's already been viable years ago, and its only been getting better every year. My team has been using it for nearly a decade now, and we can't think of a better option on the market today. Clojure is way past the point where it needs to show long term sustainability.

[cutler]

Not to mention 25000 pure Clojure libraries to add to those inherited from Java.

[iLemming]

Yes, it is growing. Today Clojure hosts more conferences than Rust, Swift, Elm, Erlang, F#, Haskell, Elixir, OCaml, ReasonML and soon the number may exceed number of Scala specific conferences. It will probably never become as popular as Javascript/Typescript or Python and Ruby but it is slowly and steadily growing.

[WillPostForFood]

I'd attribute Clojure conference success to the passionate fans, but look at the google trend line:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

[didibus]

I've noticed the reddit is less active, but I think that's just because everything needing saying was said already. At least it is for me, just busy coding.

The Clojure annual survey gets more and more participants every year, so from that angle it seems to be growing.

[WillPostForFood]

Clojure survey in 2015 had 2,445, 2016 had 2,420 responses, 2018 dropped to 2,325, and 2019 had 2,461. So pretty flat.

[didibus]

Oh you're right, I got mixed up with the announcement:

> In the first Clojure survey in 2010, 27% of respondents reported using Clojure for work and 33% for serious hobby projects. This number has steadily grown over the years and we now see 66% using it at work and 54% using it for serious hobby projects.

https://clojure.org/news/2019/02/04/state-of-clojure-2019

It's the number of Clojure devs using Clojure for work that has consistently grown. Interesting that this has happened without the community growing in numbers.

[Scarbutt]

As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1].

Not to sound snarky, but that could be interpreted as old clojure projects can't find Clojure programmers.

[iLemming]

No, it's not because of that. The reason I think - F# and Clojure are two main FP languages being used in Finance. Fintech companies are known for paying above average salary. Both F# and Clojure are the most paid languages (according to SO surveys of the last few years)

[agumonkey]

It's not the same though, few years ago, every conf was a ~revelation. That said real professional growth is actually even better.