[patrickthebold]

I love clojure, and would love a clojure job, BUT my hesitation comes from the companies choosing clojure or any niche language. Choosing a niche language seems like a very risky move, to me. My fear is that that its a small company and someone senior and technical (CTO?) just wants to have fun in a new cool language because they are bored.

Don't get me wrong, I also want to have fun in a new cool language because I'm bored, but that's not a good decision for a company to pick that as a tool.

Anyway, I'm worried that the culture is not entirely practical in their technical decisions, and that's my hesitation.

[wtetzner]

You may be right about many companies’ decisions, but I will say that Clojure is a very practical language. I think you’d just need to ask them why they chose it, and decide for yourself if you think it was a wise decision.

[shocks]

Ask them during the interview stage.

Sometimes a strange/obscure language is the correct choice for a very good (and fun/interesting!) reason.

[ptttr]

I understand your worry, but I've had a quite opposite take on this.

I think we can agree that it's not that hard to find ANY job as an experienced developer. However it's much more difficult to find a great, satisfying job. For that you need to navigate around a lot of corpo-bullshit type of projects, and Clojure has served me well as a useful filter in doing that. My reasoning is that Clojure is niche enough that when company is using it, you can assume that it's due to a deliberate technical choice, and not just because of its popularity. That tells me two things that are symptomatic, in my opinion, of a healthy tech company culture: - tech decisions are made by engineers, not by top-level executives, - their conclusions and bets align with mine because we all see and agree on Clojure's edge over more popular solutions.

Admittedly, there's always a risk that someone just followed the hype and got out of their depth but I think this risk is relatively small, because Clojure's no longer a new kid on a block and choosing a tech stack is a major decision and usually done by senior tech leadership, hopefully less hype driven.

Of course, Clojure is no silver bullet and it's just a tool that gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Messy codebases are just as possible as in other languages, especially when the team is new to lisps that are very different from mainstream languages, but that's a nature of software development - you learn with the experience. I do cringe when I look at the Clojure code I wrote when I was just starting and wasn't fully grasping Clojure's way of thinking, but the more I use it, the more I come to appreciate how powerful it is.

Great intro that made it click for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1DazRK_a0 (Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald, 2019)

Having said that, no software project is ever complete and so isn't Clojure as an ecosystem. The tooling is constantly evolving and new patterns are emerging. What's great about Clojure open-source community is that everyone seems to share the desire to harness complexity and Rich Hickey has convinced each one of us at some point that the way to do it is through simplicity https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

Even within Clojure's community there's a diversity of approaches, and I think it's necessary to improve and evolve. The more recent trend, I've noticed is that the community is converging at Data Oriented Programming that's applicable in other languages as well, but has always been at the core of Clojure's mindset that is especially well suited for it.

Dropping some links relevant about DOP: https://youtu.be/8Kc55qOgGps?t=4175 (Rafal Dittwald, “Data Oriented Programming” 2022) - whole talk is valuable, but long so I'm linking to the most juicy snippets) https://blog.klipse.tech/dop/2022/06/22/principles-of-dop.ht...

Moreover, Clojure has already grown past the threshold of being just a niche toy and has sufficiently big market that it won't die off anytime soon. When you study history of programming languages, you'll notice that it's enormously difficult thing to do for an emerging player, especially without big corporate backing. And Clojure is as grassroot as it gets: https://clojure.org/about/history