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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 (
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.
I'm not sure what you are arguing. Clojure is a cool language, with a small community, and declining interest. Why do you think searches trend down if interest isn't trending down.
You can still be adding a few new libraries, and some new users while interest declines. Clojure had the potential to be the default Lisp, the default functional language, and perhaps the default alternative to the c family of languages. Unfortunately, it is heading towards being just another niche language. Tooling is a big problem, not because the once you learn emacs and cider it is insufficient, but because it is a pain to setup and learn emacs and cider. Not because Atom and proto-repl are bad tools, but because to get it set up you need 10 plugins and 20 config setting and it ends up being fragile - complected in a major way. Another part of the problem is that Clojure advocates vastly overvalue the what unique benefits Clojure adds things like hot reloading and the REPL. Clojure and ClojureScript might have better or more pure implementations, but everyone has some form of these features now. It isn't a compelling argument to say switch to Clojure, change programming paradigms, learn Lisp, learn emacs, learn java, so you can get a hot reload that is 15% better than what you have now.
BTW, when I started getting interested in Clojure, one of the videos I learned from was your Philly ETE presentation. So I have a lot of respect for where you are coming from, but I wish the Clojure community was less defensive, and more unified around a strategy to promote and grow the language.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.