[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 People have already mentioned Incanter in this thread, one of many abandoned and out of date libraries.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...