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Respondents: 2014 - 1339 2015 - 2445 2016 - 2420 2017 - 2325 2018 - 2325 Has the uptake of Clojure plateaued?

sannee 9y ago
The survey might have been setup so that there is a constant amount of respondents? After some point, you don't really need more. However, judging by StackOverflow Trends [0], it's even dropping. [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=clojure https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=clojure
- puredanger 9y ago
  Stackoverflow has always been a place where Clojure produces a weaker signal. Most people in the Clojure community ask questions elsewhere (irc in the old days, mailing list, Slack, clojure subreddit, clojureverse, etc). As Clojure has always had a very friendly and welcoming culture towards newcomers, people usually get their questions answered rapidly on these forums.
- FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
  Purely anecdotal, but as someone learning Clojure I never post to SO. The slack channel is active enough to get an answer fast and to be honest SO is not a nice place to ask dumb questions.
puredanger 9y ago
Note that there was no survey in 2017 so that data point can be removed. The surveys in all of these years were open for different amounts of time and advertised on different platforms at different frequencies. I think primarily they show the limit on the number of people willing to take an online survey. The big jump from 2014 to 2015 coincides with the emergence of the Clojure Slack community. As a real-time chat platform it tends to collect more people and make it easier to find people in the community that are available right now to answer a survey. I think it is very hard to conclude from this data alone anything useful about the number of users of Clojure. I watch metrics on a number of platforms (some public, some private) and my sense right now is that there at least a small spike happening over the last few months, but again it's very difficult to conclude anything with certainty.
wink 9y ago
Claiming part-time responsibility, I think 2018 is the first year where I just missed it. :P
fulafel 9y ago
It might have something to do with the relative decline of Java - People used to flock to Clojure from the JVM. In the current trend of Node-based backends, the combo of "share code on frontend & backend" and "use your existing Java backend libraries" is no longer so distinctive, because there are lots of npm libs available now for the backend. And there's the microservice trend, which also makes it easy to integrate JVM components into an otherwise Node based backend. Clojure(Script) is still a much better language than JS of course, but the other factors offer less additional boost now than in 2015. There seems to be a backswing of the pendulum now against microservices. Maybe we will get one for Node backends too?

The survey might have been setup so that there is a constant amount of respondents? After some point, you don't really need more. However, judging by StackOverflow Trends [0], it's even dropping. [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=clojure https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=clojure

puredanger 9y ago
Stackoverflow has always been a place where Clojure produces a weaker signal. Most people in the Clojure community ask questions elsewhere (irc in the old days, mailing list, Slack, clojure subreddit, clojureverse, etc). As Clojure has always had a very friendly and welcoming culture towards newcomers, people usually get their questions answered rapidly on these forums.
FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
Purely anecdotal, but as someone learning Clojure I never post to SO. The slack channel is active enough to get an answer fast and to be honest SO is not a nice place to ask dumb questions.

puredanger 9y ago

Note that there was no survey in 2017 so that data point can be removed. The surveys in all of these years were open for different amounts of time and advertised on different platforms at different frequencies. I think primarily they show the limit on the number of people willing to take an online survey. The big jump from 2014 to 2015 coincides with the emergence of the Clojure Slack community. As a real-time chat platform it tends to collect more people and make it easier to find people in the community that are available right now to answer a survey. I think it is very hard to conclude from this data alone anything useful about the number of users of Clojure. I watch metrics on a number of platforms (some public, some private) and my sense right now is that there at least a small spike happening over the last few months, but again it's very difficult to conclude anything with certainty.

wink 9y ago

Claiming part-time responsibility, I think 2018 is the first year where I just missed it. :P

fulafel 9y ago

It might have something to do with the relative decline of Java - People used to flock to Clojure from the JVM. In the current trend of Node-based backends, the combo of "share code on frontend & backend" and "use your existing Java backend libraries" is no longer so distinctive, because there are lots of npm libs available now for the backend. And there's the microservice trend, which also makes it easy to integrate JVM components into an otherwise Node based backend. Clojure(Script) is still a much better language than JS of course, but the other factors offer less additional boost now than in 2015. There seems to be a backswing of the pendulum now against microservices. Maybe we will get one for Node backends too?