[jwr]

I've been running my business for 10 years now, relying on Clojure and ClojureScript. It is amazing to be able to base one's livelihood on a foundation that is so stable and well designed. Clojure has been designed by a very smart and very experienced person, and it shows. It has then been maintained and extended by a team built around a culture of maturity and stability, and the result is something you can rely on.

The fact that I can use the same language to develop business model code that runs on both the client and the server, or that I don't have to use a different on-the-wire format for sending data between them (EDN does the job great) is just icing on the cake in this context.

I am very thankful to Rich and the entire Clojure (and ClojureScript) teams for giving me access to all their work (for free!).

BTW, if you haven't seen any of Rich's talks, go see them — they are worth it even if you do not intend to use Clojure.

[abyssin]

Rich's talks have been the apex of my programming career. I didn't like sitting in front of a computer to the extent needed to make a living from it, so I moved on to another industry. And maybe I wasn't smart enough to become competent in Clojure. But I'm thankful for the eureka moments that Rich offered me. He's such a beautiful mind.

[thsbrown]

Would love to know what industry you ended up in. Daydreaming about working with my hands out and about one day lol.

[rbanffy]

A lot of people abandon tech for less stressful careers. Things like air traffic control and firefighting, or deep sea diving for the oil industry.

[abyssin]

I'm pivoting to mental health. But the trades are quite appealing too!

[NeutralForest]

I would love to use Clojure but there are basically no jobs in my area with the language. Seems like the Nordics like Clojure but I'd need to move.

The very good backwards compatibility is attractive but as the result of the small community, there's also a lot of abandoned packages and fewer QoL packages (formatters, linters, etc); I know there are some but for example I had setup `cljfmt` in Emacs and it wouldn't work, didn't look further.

[malloryerik]

VS Code and its forks (Cursor, Antigravity, etc.) have Calva, a fantastic REPL with excellent linter Kondo. These are amazing tools; formatting is the very least of it. You don't need Emacs. I personally using VS Code + Doom Emacs. Also, many packages that look abandoned are simply mature. You can literally use ten year old packages.

I'm not a hot shot programmer, entirely self-taught but a decent architect who thinks hard about problems, and with LLM agents Clojure shines for me. There are some fantastic databases also starting with Datomic -- free now thanks to Nubank -- and everything inspired by it and the Clojure flavor of Datalog. These include Datalevin, Datahike, DataScript, XTDB. Datomic itself is probably best for enterprise though there's now an embedded version.

But I'm pretty convinced that most LLMs I've used are more reliable with Clojure (and Elixir) than with most of the popular languages, and I can say they use Datalog extremely well, seemingly much better than SQL despite the vast difference in corpus size. For one thing Datalog just gets rid of joins issues.

[jwr]

> I would love to use Clojure but there are basically no jobs in my area with the language

I created my own job :-)

(although there are Clojure jobs in my area)

[NeutralForest]

Always a solution ofc!

[weavejester]

cljfmt is included with both Clojure-LSP and CIDER, so if you have either installed it should work out of the box.

With LSP mode the standard `lsp-format-region` and `lsp-format-buffer` commands should work, and on the CIDER side `cider-format-defun`, `cider-format-region` and `cider-format-buffer` should also invoke cljfmt.

[NeutralForest]

Hey! Thanks for creating the package =) I'll need to try the integration again.

[weavejester]

I'll add a note to the cljfmt README to tell people about these commands, as your experience shows that it might not be obvious to people that they likely already have access to cljfmt in Emacs as a result of using LSP or CIDER.

[waffletower]

There are still Clojure remote positions. Thankfully, I have used Clojure professionally long enough that my core ability shouldn't atrophy too much now that we have moved away from it at my current position. I am looking forward to Jank actually.

[NeutralForest]

Why did you move from it if I may ask?

[waffletower]

There were multiple reasons at our company -- my particular team, all skilled Clojurists, decided to default to python last year for a variety of reasons including both AI code generation suitability and AI model utilization in our code bases; the latter is of high relevance for our particular work. While I find Clojure to be among the best languages for interacting with LLMs via API, it is awkward for interacting with local models directly. Of all on the team, I was probably most open to a polyglot approach.

[jwr]

> AI code generation

Incidentally, I am having great success using AI with Clojure. In fact, from what I read online, better than most. I'm not sure if it's due to Clojure's terseness (and hence, token economy), or other reasons, but it works very, very well.

[waffletower]

I agree -- all modern frontier models I have tested generate Clojure very well.

[NeutralForest]

Fair enough!

[agency]

Simple Made Easy[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/] in particular had a huge impact on the way I think about writing software at a formative time in my development/career. I have not had the chance to use Clojure professionally, but thinking about software in terms of "intertwining" is the idea I return to when evaluating software designs, regardless of technology, and gave me a way to articulate what makes software difficult to reason about.

[puredanger]

FYI, the canonical version (recut slides / video / audio) of this talk can now be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

[agency]

I always wondered what that juggling animation slide looked like!