[datahead]

Great article. Even in a large enterprise, where the prevailing organizational ideology centers around building the largest headcount you can for political sway...

I've kept my team small on purpose, and we were able to be very effective by adopting clojure. We have sway because we deliver- and that's a different type of leverage than headcount. We don't get thrown every hot potato, instead we're consistently aligned with the critical portfolios.

A small dedicated team with tools such as clojure will outdeliver, and outcompete a larger team who cannot remain agile and require significant overhead to manage.

I'm basically rehashing PG's 'Beating the Averages', but it's been my experience as a dev mgr. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

[dasil003]

This totally makes sense in a startup context, but how does this work in a large enterprise? For instance, who signs off on "critical portfolios" being migrated to clojure, and who maintains these pieces when your team moves onto the next project?

[datahead]

First, if you haven't worked in a large "non-tech" enterprise, you might be surprised to find out it's just 100 startups with a common name and financing. The bigger the company, the less technical cohesion across teams. It's a blessing and a curse. I'm technically in a "business unit" as opposed to IT, so we're more focused on tangible KPIs. When you turn around innovative results in the biz domain consistently, no one really questions your tooling.

We started a new space Data Eng/ Data Sci and then it became critical. We've been able to maintain products by building long term platforms/systems that meet current and (anticipated) future needs in clojure. Initially, product and platform/system was all the same team. We've grown a little and now individuals tend to focus more on one or the other, but we're still <15 eng and shipping daily.

We maintain everything we've built to date, and we planned for that going in. Clojure's other superpower is that it is stable AF over long periods of time, handles refactors and testing well.

As for signoff in adopting clojure... our VP is old hat in clojure/lisp. We got lucky.