[kleiba]

I remember there used to be so much excitement about Clojure - it certainly was the "tech du jour" for a long while, also on the HN front page. It was the "...in Rust" of its day.

But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement?

My impression is that Clojure failed to live up to the hype, but has found its niche - but it is a rather small niche. In the end, despite its attempts to differentiate itself from Lisp pitfalls, it has gone the way of all Lisps: it's this cool, intellectually stimulating language that in practice almost nobody uses.

Is that view wrong? Please feel free to correct me, and sorry if this post is about Clojure in general and not specifically about its machine learning ecosystem.

[deadghost]

I've been using clojure as my main language for a decade. Few things can stay hyped that long.

My last few jobs were in clojure so jobs do exist, moreso than in Common Lisp and Haskell at least (probably). There aren't very many companies that use it relative to the programming world at large, so I'd say you're right on that front.

I'm happy using it and will continue using it. Sometimes I encounter interesting ideas and libraries that I end up using.

At the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write interesting things on uninteresting or even subjectively awful languages and boring things on interesting languages.

Here's something I've been working on for the last two weeks: https://keyboards.justbuythisthing.com/. If I didn't tell you I wrote it in clojure, no one would know. It could very well be PHP.

[nextos]

I would not say it is such a small niche. There are job openings here and there. It is much easier to find a Clojure job than a F# or a Haskell job in my experience. This may be of course different depending on your location.

The problem is that an entire ecosystem is more than just a new language. Clojure has some really interesting libraries, but the rest relies on Java. It is a good ecosystem nonetheless. Julia is having the same issue. It has grown a very respectable ecosystem, but it is hard to grow further to catch up with Python in some fronts without massive corporate funding.

It is interesting to note that, at some point circa 2010, it looked like Clojure could revive Lisp-Stat with Incanter. But, eventually, the project declined in popularity and died. Reaching mainstream relies on getting a critical mass of developers at the right time and for the right domain.

[actionfromafar]

And imagine if F# had an alternative native "runtime" (i.e. not married CLR and dotnet) grafted onto Fortran. Resistance is futile, indeed.

[Capricorn2481]

I don't even care about the runtime, imagine if F# devs made anything that wasn't on top of Asp.net. The small community coupled with breaking changes from Asp.net leads to a lot of issues, and the interop story of F#/C# and Clojure/Java is night and day

I like Asp.net, but the thing I've run into several times in F# is there are breaking changes in libraries that the developers of F# can't keep up with.

- Giraffe doesn't support swagger docs, you have to use Asp.net directly, because the swagger generation isn't compatible with the way Giraffe does routing

- Microsoft Identity uses EF core by default. The EFcore.FSharp library doesn't support past .NET 6. You could use your own backend, but at this point, it's easier to just use C# interop

You could use C# for the routing of your app and F# for the business logic. But then there's the C#/F# interop story. Lots of little finicky type differences you have to convert. Whereas using Java from Clojure feels easy and natural to me.

And even if you use Asp.net directly and do interop correctly, you're basically using C# at that point. You're missing a lot of benefits of a functional language. It's not worth it in my opinion, even though F# is a wonderful language to me.

It's tough to learn the ecosystem in Clojure. But once you do, I've found the "small libraries" approach much better than the whole ecosystem tying itself to one web framework it can't even keep up with.

[pjmlp]

What you describe is a very good example, why I seldom rely on guest languages for production code.

Communities can't control themselves, always try to create an ecosystem on top of the ecosystem, some of them even are quite vocal against the platform that made their beloved language possible in first places.

Thus as the platform moves under their feet, everyone fails to keep up, to make anything usable one has to master now two stacks instead of one, and spend even more time tracking down issues.

Clojure's approach to embrace the host is a much better way to handle this.

[throw868788]

Its funny because I've found the opposite; the fact that the smaller community (and lets face it - most FP langs have a much smaller community than needed to get the scale you are after) the more it needs to piggy back on the army of engineers in the mainstream language target and stick to only its value add as a technology. There were web frameworks in F# that were written from scratch, but fundamentally ASP.NET is quite good and fast enough at least from my evaluations and these frameworks are now out of favor.

I personally don't have much issues using ASP.NET directly from F# (don't bother with Giraffe or anything like that); its not too hard. The routing layer is only a few classes/functions anyway - it isn't the majority of your program. I guess maybe I'm in a different position to you - I find for the few bits of ASP.NET config it isn't worth switching to C#. A few rules you need to follow but I would say that is a lot less than the Clojure learning curve and you get static typing still - that is just my opinion however.

My experience is that both languages have their pros/cons and tbh both have their challenges w.r.t adoption. My personal view is most of these challenges are not technical. The issues we complain about with the language as developers are IMO minor (i.e. things are still possible or decent compared to some other languages) and probably aren't the major factor in the wide scale technology choice away from FP in general.

For better or worse developers are often "languages takers" not "language deciders" in most big shops and this is where most of the jobs are - its only in niche elements/problem spaces (i.e small shops, dedicated niche teams, etc) where niche technologies can be worth it. This means not a lot of jobs; but when there is a job it can be higher paying. Big employers drive the market for technologies though when it comes to large scale usage and they want commodity fungible developers (i.e. resources), and are happy using a mediocre tech that gets the job done to do it. Unless there is a "killer app" where the language must be used to unlock the value most managements will stay clear of better tech - predictable, boring, commodity tech that I can get anyone in for (contractor, offshore person, etc) wins for them every time especially for the MBA/product manager/etc types. In the current economic climate developers are trying to meet the jobs that are being advertised as well (higher interest rates, less startup's, etc etc).

[Capricorn2481]

For me it's not that using Asp.net from F# is bad, but the little things that add up.

Like I said, if you want to use Microsoft Identity, you need to either write your own backend that doesn't use EFcore or use .NET 6 instead of 8. Why? EFcore is essentially a scaffolding library. You can't use it from F# without EFcore.FSharp. EFCore.FSharp doesn't support anything higher than .NET 6.

So now we have a scenario where the main auth library in asp.net doesn't work in F#. I've never had these issues in Clojure where I just flat out can't use a Java library.

[banashark]

I understand where you're coming from on these 100%, but I believe some of the conclusions might be more dire than they are in practice.

Both identity and efcore both work fine with F#. What _doesn't_ work is the EF Core design-time support (having models auto-create your schema) and scaffolding razor pages with F# (razor pages just doesn't work in general).

Calling these APIs (authing your users, and interacting with the database) work fine.

I've used mostly database-first design, and tweaked the stock identity pages code anyways so these things haven't affected me a ton (though I _would_ like to use razor pages, since it seems nice and simple for the 80% use-case).

[neonsunset]

Have you looked into whether the maintainers of EFCore.FSharp look for assistance?

It seems there is work in progress on bringing .NET 8 support here https://github.com/efcore/EFCore.FSharp/pull/162

[fire_lake]

Suave does not depend on Asp.net

[icey]

Isn’t this effectively OCaml? Minus the Fortran part but it doesn’t need any other runtime.

[actionfromafar]

Sort of I guess, but there are things like how they look very different and that F# is very very fast, has static types and OCaml is not exactly slow but not fast exactly fast, either.

[bachmeier]

> at some point circa 2010, it looked like Clojure could revive Lisp-Stat with Incanter

I think there was hope that would happen, but Incanter simply didn't have the functionality or documentation needed to become a player in that space in 2010. It was a doomed effort because of the (intentional) difficulty of native interoperability on the JVM. They'd have had to rewrite tens of millions of lines of code to realize their goals.

[throw868788]

I do think this depends on region, as I've seen F# and Scala jobs typically outnumber Clojure for example depending on whether it is a .NET or Java shop. Mileage does vary.

However to be honest anecdotally I do think even if they aren't going down in user terms, FP languages are losing percentage market share. From my personal experience FP is no longer new; the hype of FP in general has died down. The hype has moved onto other things over the years (e.g. AI, blockchain, bare metal technologies that enable the above, etc etc).

I'm not saying FP doesn't have a lot of value. I enjoy, particularly when the program calls for it, FP languages like F#, Scala, etc. They still offer a lot of value IMO for all the usual spouted reasons.

IMO I just think the hype has moved from technologies that do things better (i.e. more efficient, less error prone, makes my job easier, etc) to technologies that do shiny new things. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them aren't in fact technical but economic and political (e.g. management). Things like less jobs globally in tech (meaning my skills need to have wider reach), demand for specialist roles that aren't as language focused, etc play a part. Mainstream languages taking FP features as well makes the return vs risk of using a FP language even worse of a tradeoff - there's less perceived return for changing stack than before.

[gorjusborg]

I feel like Clojure did live up to the hype, but is different enough that there was little chance that it would dominate in the mainstream.

The language ecosystem reflects the smaller numbers of contributors.

[zelphirkalt]

I think there is a lack of companies willing to hire for it, and also a lack of qualified people to hire.

I would like to learn it and probably would like to work with it. Only downsides I see is reliance on JVM (which is also a strength) and not as good ways of recursion as other Lisps or Schemes (simply call the function, duh, because it just works and doesn't need extra keywords or syntax).

But I liked the talks and that is seems to have the functional datastructured one needs, if one wants to avoid mutation.

[synthc]

I think the language has indeed reached a stable point and found its niche, which is small, but there are certainly domains where Clojure is the best fit.

The ideas behind Clojure (functional, immutable datastructures, homoiconic syntax, focus on simplicity, JVM interop) still stand strong IMO.

There are still some exciting projects done in Clojure: Electric Clojure and Rama come to mind.

[yawn]

> but there are certainly domains where Clojure is the best fit

Honest question: what domains?

[dustingetz]

clojure is everywhere in fintech - nubank, guaranteed rate, kroo bank, griffin, pennymac, two sigma, dividend finance, treasury prime, gravie. Other big areas are healthcare and midmarket adtech. And of course startups outside of SF/NYC with smaller seed rounds looking for tech advantage - midwest USA, Europe/UK, Latin america

The further you get from silicon valley the more clojure you see — anyone with a network at FANG spent the last 10 years trying to break in and get that huge salary, which means conforming to the recruiting process, i.e. spending your time off grinding leetcode instead of learning new PLs

[jimberlage]

Speaking from past experience at Guaranteed Rate, management (probably not developers) regrets that experiment. They’ve laid off most of the clojure devs I know of there (I’m sure one or two remain for legacy services.)

[cnasc]

I interviewed at Two Sigma like 6 years ago and I was interested in doing Clojure professionally so I asked about it and was told that they had stopped all new development in Clojure

[agumonkey]

is clojure market still growing ? i'd love to work in a clojure shop one day

[dkersten]

The most unexpected place I’ve encountered Clojure “in the wild” is the Defold game engines editor.

[clusterhacks]

Doesn't this ignore the reality on the ground that Clojure is a niche (but wonderful) programming language that offers very few career opportunities? It simply isn't big in any specific domain.

I also don't buy that you see more Clojure the "further you get from silicon valley ..." without some actual (or even anecdotal) data to support that claim.

I'm not saying there are zero instances of Clojure in production systems. But it is hard for me to think that it represents a large number of professional employed software engineers. The 2023 StackOverflow survey show 1.38% out of 67,053 respondents in their "most commonly used programming language" section naming Clojure. That is less than 1,000 developers. The public university I work at graduated 500+ CS undergrads in 2023. I would bet $100 that zero of those got a first job that paid them to write Clojure professionally. I would bet $1000 for less than ten grads. I would bet $50,000 for less than 25.

I'm not trying to be cute but don't you think there are less than 10,000 software engineers in the US (maybe the freaking world) who primarily write Clojure code in their day job?

Because I'm curious, job searches at the company site of your list for 'clojure':

  Nubank - enhum resultado com a palavra "clojure" encontrado (no results)

  Guaranteed Rate - no results

  Kroo Bank careers page - no tech listings currently

  Griffin - open listing for software engineer (London or Remote within the UK, Germany, Sweden or Ireland) - description: Our backend stack is Clojure, FoundationDB, Kubernetes and AWS. Our frontend stack is CLJS, Reframe, Reagent, React, Stitches, Storybook, and Playroom.

  Pennymac - Sorry, no jobs were found that match your search criteria. 

  Two Sigma - No jobs found

  Dividend Finance - 0 JOBS FOUND

  Treasury Prime - There are no current openings. (for software engineers)

  Gravie - Lead software engineer position - description: Advanced programming experience in multiple programming languages ( Java, Kotlin, Groovy/Grails, JavaScript/TypeScript or Python) along with Clojure/ClojureScript or another functional programming language

Indeed.com returns 15 jobs posted in the last two weeks (US) for the Clojure keyword. LinkedIn returns 34 job posting in the last month (again, in the US).

I love Clojure - it has always "worked" in my head as a language to solve problems in. I was at the first Clojure/conj. I have deployed production code that I wrote in Clojure. Clojure made me a better developer in other languages.

But in the big picture for professional software engineers, Clojure might as well not exist.

[dustingetz]

because most of Electric Clojure's commercial users and prospects are European startups (I am the founder)

[yayitswei]

Financial services for one. Might be the Nubank influence.

[lgrapenthin]

Clojure focuses on quality over hype, at great success. Its hypesters never really understood Clojure, and have long moved on. So will the hypesters of Rust and other hyped languages, unless they get a chance to ruin them.

[lispisok]

I think Clojure absolutely does live up to the hype but during Clojure's peak HN hype days all the people upvoting the posts and commenting in the threads never actually gave Clojure a proper try or a try at all. Rust on HN might be in a similar boat.

[cess11]

Aren't they having problems with new Java versions? Heard someone say something along those lines a while ago, or I misunderstood.

It also seems Rich Hickey kind of stopped doing interesting talks, and some big bank bought into it and no one really likes banks.

[armed]

It is not true, currently I'm maintaining a desktop app which is shipped to 3 different platforms and 3 architectures (x86, x86-64, arm64) and runs various versions of JRE (from jre8 to jre22). Most (90%) of the libraries are fully compatible, only some are using latest features such as virtual threads, but it is easy to avoid.

[cess11]

OK, good to hear. Couldn't find anything clear about it when web searching and looking at documentation.

[yayitswei]

Interesting is subjective, but Rich gave a talk at the most recent Clojure Conj.

[cess11]

I looked at ClojureTV and that's all I saw from recent years.

[kmclean]

There was a bit of a conference hiatus worldwide due to the pandemic, but the Clojure community (including Rich) is definitely still active.

[lgrapenthin]

None of this is true.

[cess11]

Sure, nothing is true, everything is permitted.