[lacker]

I like Clojure, but it's really the exact opposite of the sort of "boring technology" that this post advocates. If MongoDB costs you 2 innovation tokens, Clojure costs at least 2, perhaps all 3.

The cost of innovation is not so much in the core of Clojure itself, but that once your company gets larger, you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility, just because the language is not very popular. Also hiring.

[jayceedenton]

What is this 'Clojure compatibility' of which you speak? Seriously though, Clojure runs on the JVM so the entire Java ecosystem is available. There are ways to run an external process too of course. I can't really think of an example where 'Clojure compatibility' is something we would require people to have thought about.

[lacker]

A simple example is, let's say you're making a small web service. Are you going to use a Clojure framework or a Java framework via JVM compatibility? If you pick a Clojure framework, then all the subsequent choices you have to make, you'll run into the "non boring tech" issues. Has someone already built a GraphQL plugin, a plugin that integrates with the Twitter preview API, etc etc it depends on your project but you'll run into things. If you pick a Java framework, you'll end up running into a bunch of cases where you can't use the "normal solution" for that framework because you're running Clojure.

It's not the end of the world or anything, and for a smaller project Clojure might be the perfect solution. But if it's something that you're trying to scale into a startup with dozens of engineers then you're probably going to pay a higher incompatibility cost for using Clojure.

[Scarbutt]

you will want to integrate with more and more things that have not put effort into Clojure compatibility

The answer to that is to just use java interop.

[throwaway1777]

Or even to have some clojure services and some Java ones. And then work toward more clojure over time if there’s good reason to do it.

[smackeyacky]

And the rebuttal is just use Java as it requires less integration.