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I've been working with Clojure for about 8 years professionally now, and I haven't touched Emacs in all that time. I started with CCW for Eclipse, and later mov

I've been working with Clojure for about 8 years professionally now, and I haven't touched Emacs in all that time. I started with CCW for Eclipse, and later moved to Cursive with IntelliJ. I find the IDE experience for Clojure is quite reasonable now. You get a lot of what you'd expect in terms IDE support such as automatically requiring namespaces on usage, finding usages for symbols, auto-refactoring, and so on. In terms of hiring developers my team hasn't had a problem with that either. We've only hired a single person who knew Clojure ahead of time, and we trained the rest of the hires on it on the job. Our experience is that it takes about a couple of weeks for somebody to start writing useful code with guidance. We start by doing a bit of pairing, and we do code reviews for pull requests where we help make sure new hires are writing idiomatic code. When you have at least one experienced Clojure dev on the team already, onboarding tends to be pretty smooth. One huge benefit we found posting for Clojure is that we get completely different set of applicants than when we posted for Java. There are many excellent Java devs out there, however finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack and you're competing with many other companies for them. Meanwhile, most people applying for Clojure jobs tend to have genuine interest in learning something new, and they're very enthusiastic about it. We get a smaller pool of applicants, but on the other hands most of the people applying are actually worth considering.

edem 8y ago
Where do you live? SF I presume?
- yogthos 8y ago
  I work at a hospital in Toronto, Canada.
  - edem 8y ago
    Yep, Toronto is a nice place, but in Budapest, Hungary Clojure programmers are basically non-existent. What you are saying might fit Canada, or the USA, but not every other part of the world.
    - yogthos 8y ago
      My main point was that we don't hire Clojure programmers on my team. We hire programmers who are willing to learn new things on the job, and one of these things happens to be Clojure. I see this is as a helpful filter because if somebody isn't willing to learn a new language, chances aren't very flexible as a developer in general. The nature of our industry is that it's constantly evolving, and you have to be adaptable to keep up.

edem 8y ago

Where do you live? SF I presume?

yogthos 8y ago
I work at a hospital in Toronto, Canada.
- edem 8y ago
  Yep, Toronto is a nice place, but in Budapest, Hungary Clojure programmers are basically non-existent. What you are saying might fit Canada, or the USA, but not every other part of the world.
  - yogthos 8y ago
    My main point was that we don't hire Clojure programmers on my team. We hire programmers who are willing to learn new things on the job, and one of these things happens to be Clojure. I see this is as a helpful filter because if somebody isn't willing to learn a new language, chances aren't very flexible as a developer in general. The nature of our industry is that it's constantly evolving, and you have to be adaptable to keep up.