That's my impression too, and I think it's happening for a combination of reasons. Clojure's no longer the new thing, so its faults don't have the benefit of be

That's my impression too, and I think it's happening for a combination of reasons. Clojure's no longer the new thing, so its faults don't have the benefit of being hidden behind a lack of experience with the language. Clojure's also a language that rewards long-term investment more than most. That's inherent in all of the mechanisms for abstraction and reuse it provides, but it's not necessarily the kind of thing that's immediately obvious. In the short-term you see the funky syntax and all these linguistic tools you don't quite get, but it takes a while to see how it all fits together into a more productive whole. And by the time you do, you or your team may have moved onto something else because the error messages suck or there's not quite the library you want. I also think languages can suffer because their scope is so limited. There have been times I've thought that I'll switch languages and solve a bunch of problems, only to find out that most of my problems are still there. The requirements are still vague, the team still has its dysfunctions, and the surrounding systems are still unreliable, poorly specified, and run by teams that have no interest in helping because of some organizational dynamic set in place ten years prior. None of this should be a surprise, but the real point is that even a putative perfect programming language can only address a relatively small fraction of the problems that arise in software work. That can make it even more difficult for minority languages like Clojure to produce a positive risk-adjusted return on the investment they require to adopt in a serious way..