Ten years ago (appoximately) I read an article about how PHP was dying, thanks in part to many new languages cropping up. But I see PHP mentioned all the time h

Ten years ago (appoximately) I read an article about how PHP was dying, thanks in part to many new languages cropping up. But I see PHP mentioned all the time here on HN, and the PHP meetups in my area are frequent and popular, and major companies run on PHP. For decades, there have been rumors about the death of dynamic languages in general. And yet the decades pass and not only do those languages continue to flourish, but others come along and get popular too. Clojure just turned 10 years old and I see no signs of it slowing down. They did consolidate their 2 major conferences in the States into just one annual conference, so there's that (which may not mean anything). But I am in a large city and companies keep appearing and starting up with Clojure as their key language. With Clojure, it's an oddball because it is very simple and very powerful. Oftentimes, simple languages are not so powerful, and powerful languages are not so simple. But with Clojure, you can very easily get yourself into the situation of having extremely dense logic in just a few lines, where another language might easily take 10x (or more) lines to accomplish the same. This leads to code that can indeed be difficult to read later, especially if you are on a team and others must help maintain it. The Clojure community has come up with some excellent solutions to this problem, most recently the Clojure.spec library which is gaining wide adoption, which not only makes such "cleverness" easier to understand when reading it, but also makes a codebase automatically testable with property generators, which is a major feature. But your point about readability is always going to exist with a language like Clojure if it isn't written with a team in mind. That doesn't take away from its power though, in my opinion. However, there is one particularly indispensable tool that Clojure offers that I have not seen anything to meaningfully compete with for productivity, and that's ClojureScript. Writing a front end with Reagent or even the alternative libraries is such a major win over everything else I've tried. I've worked a bit with Elm, Typescript, Reason, Bucklescript -- I am so spoiled by the extremely fast turnaround and easy interaction with very powerful features like React in Clojurescript that I don't see anything on the horizon that will come close to replacing that workflow for now. Perhaps some day something will come along to shine an even brighter light on how front ends can be developed, but for now, ClojureScript remains one of the most significant contributions to the software industry in many, many years.