[rainygold]

Community can definitely play a role though I can't help but think that Phoenix and the proselytizing done by Jose and co are the main factors.

Sure, we have Luminus in the Clojureverse but its just not as easy and straightforward as the Rails-like experience of Phoenix. You don't have Hickey personally responding to comments on HN/Reddit etc.

[KingMob]

Hickey is extremely remote from the Clojure community. Most of Cognitect is. Really, only Alex Miller engages on a regular basis. To a lesser extent, Fogus and Ghadi do, too.

The Clojurescript community is friendlier, IMO.

[rainygold]

Much to the detriment of the language imo, and he didn't help the feeling when he released 'Open Source is not about you'

[uDontKnowMe]

I would agree here that the combination of being "closed to collaboration", the slow pace of development lately, and really infrequent communication from the sole owner/leader/BDFL does send a weird vibe and raises some concern regarding what direction the language is going to be going in in the future.

[cutler]

One of the big reasons, in my opinion, for Clojure failing to fulfill its potential as a mainstream language. Clojure had SO much going for it then it just flatlined. Sad indeed and very much down to its stewardship.

[jshen]

Isn’t one of the beauties of lisp is that you don’t need much from the language creator. It should be far more stable than non-lisp languages, and you can implement most ideas with macros outside of the core language.

[uDontKnowMe]

You can get a pretty long way but there are still things that need to be improved over time. For example Clojure still 7 years after the java 8 release doesn't have great integration with java 8 functional interfaces, which is a pretty big detriment to java interop. I saw this patch which seems to have been submitted by a community member https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-2637 (not sure if the author is a core contributor or what), but even after month no comment from Rich or anyone else on the team to indicate if this is a good idea, if they'd let it in or what.

[pjmlp]

Maybe not, but I do agree with him, too many people in open source feel entitled to get stuff for free (beer) without contributing, many corporations that leech on open source as well.

[didibus]

For the most part, Clojure is tuned for experienced developers I think. It's kind of an oximoron, but it feels like it was Rich Hickey's goal as well, to not appeal to any of the "easy" and "convenient" and "familiar", but focus entirely in "no bs", "simple" and "very flexible" pieces that never break backwards compatibility, are always open for extension, keep performance in mind, reaches for battle tested hosts when it can, and all that.