[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

[WillPostForFood]

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.

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

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.

[yogthos]

The claim that there's declining interest is absurd, and that's what I'm arguing. Google trends are simply not a measure of anything interesting in practice. It's about as useful as throwing around TIOBE rankings.

>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.

It's quite clear you haven't used Clojure tooling if that's your impression of it. Again, Clojure has some of the best tooling I've used in any language and I've been doing development for around 2 decades now. Intellij and Cursive are a fantastic combination that takes minutes to install. Calva is another great option for VS Code and it's also a one click install. Both these projects are actually being funded. Cursive is a commercial product and Calva is funded via Clojurists Together. Both Cursive and Calva show just how much the community has grown, since people and companies are willing to pay for tooling nowadays. That's a real measure of growth.

>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.

Again, this is completely false. I'm not aware of any mainstream languages that facilitate anything remotely like this workflow: https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/what-makes-a-good-repl....

>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.

Switching to Clojure provides far more benefits than just having hot reloading, and these benefits are very convincing for plenty of companies using Clojure today. These benefits also tend to appeal predominantly to experienced developers: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#work-_-salary...

[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.