[nokun7]

I recall when I used to work for Pupper Labs - then PuppetDB jumping to Clojure in 2012 was a gutsy call that totally paid off and put the language on the map. Puppet was a Ruby shop, but as data piled up, they needed something really cool and risky—enter Clojure, which we though was a slick Lisp running on the JVM. It turned PuppetDB into a beast for storing catalogs and reports, leaving Ruby’s old setup in the dust with crazy speed boosts, like 130 times faster for some tasks, thanks to its async magic and functional vibe. We could’ve gone Java or JRuby, but Clojure’s concise code and JVM power hit the sweet spot, making PuppetDB a lean, scalable backbone for thousands of nodes. It wasn’t just a tech switch—it showed Clojure could hang with the big dogs, influencing Puppet’s later projects and proving a niche language could rock real-world infrastructure. It was the best move and kept thing really interesting - in a good way of course.