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Clojure has come up a lot more frequently on HN than in the past. I'm curious if there is a particular larger project that is using clojure that's driving a lo

Clojure has come up a lot more frequently on HN than in the past. I'm curious if there is a particular larger project that is using clojure that's driving a lot of this? Or particular JVM application like Kafka?

afhammad 6y ago
Some recent/notable examples: https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com is built with Clojure(Script). https://storm.apache.org https://storm.apache.org was written in Clojure but more recently re-written in Java to encourage OS contribution
Royalaid 6y ago
Cognitect, the company that shepherds and maintains Clojure, has joined Nubank (https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank) and so they are starting to flesh and grow the core team as well as fund some of the open source projects/devs that the ecosystem relies on (https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/12/15/sponsoring-open-source-developers https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/12/15/sponsoring-open-source...). Add to this a lot of people are changing jobs and pushing for using more alternative languages or exploring new languages and as a result many people are building in what they want instead of what they are forced to use at work. The sibling comment about roam is a good example as they have had a lot of press lately.
iLemming 6y ago
At least a dozen big companies are running on large Clojure codebases: Apple, Cisco, Walmart Labs, Funding Circle, Nubank, Metabase, CircleCI, Grammarly, to name a few. Many smaller companies built their entire businesses using Clojure stack. The days when Clojure was just "a toy to impress your friends" are long gone. It's a mature ecosystem for the serious craft. Today it's the most widely used FP language; it has gained popularity and doing better than OCaml, Erlang/Elixir, Elm, Haskell, F#, and even Scala. Clojure is slowly but steadily growing. Without any support from the big players. I think the core Clojure team has fewer people than teams at Facebook and Google for front-end libraries like React and Angular. Podcasts are being recorded, books published, conferences organized. Skeptics often criticize "not growing, small but very vocal community", they call it "a cult of Rich Hickey" and pronounce the language to be dying. The truth is - many companies realizing the incredible pragmatism of ideas behind Clojure.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > The truth is - many companies realizing the incredible pragmatism of ideas behind Clojure. My employer is moving away from cljoure after 100% of the stack on clojure/clojurescript for over 10 yrs. All the companies that you mentioned ( with the exception of nubank) adopted Clojure years ago. Curious to know if there are new companies picking clojure, your comment seems to imply so.
  - pivo 6y ago
    > My employer is moving away from cljoure I'd be interested in why that is if you have a moment to write a bit about it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - iLemming 6y ago
    I'm not an investor or someone whose job is to track companies and their tech stacks (I can't list them here), but there are many, many medium and small startups that adopted Clojure not too long ago (especially in European countries). Pitch.com was founded in 2018, Clubhouse.io, Metabase in 2014; Ladder in 2015; Flexiana, Watchful.io in 2016. Mind that these are official dates when the companies were established, some took at least a year, two, or even more to get going. Your case is anecdotal, and I bet it has little to do with Clojure itself and primarily is driven by some other factors. There are tons of talks from various Clojure conferences on Youtube, where the speakers come from different startups.
- nojito 6y ago
  >Today it's the most widely used FP language; it has gained popularity and doing better than OCaml, Erlang/Elixir, Elm, Haskell, F#, and even Scala. I find it very hard to believe that clojure is beating out F#. F# has been included in the .NET runtime. Anyone who has c# automagically has f# available to them. Do you have a source to your claim? edit: guess not
  - iLemming 6y ago
ithrow 6y ago
Lisps are cool, Clojure is cool but that's about it, just like Scheme is cool. HN probably has the biggest crowd of devs that know (and like) Lisps, even if they don't use it for everyday things. Anything about Lisps gets upvoted quickly but if you look at Clojure posts here in HN, you'll see that all the comments don't really have any substance (also, look at the point to comments ratio of Clojure posts.).

afhammad 6y ago

Some recent/notable examples: https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com is built with Clojure(Script). https://storm.apache.org https://storm.apache.org was written in Clojure but more recently re-written in Java to encourage OS contribution

Royalaid 6y ago

Cognitect, the company that shepherds and maintains Clojure, has joined Nubank (https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank) and so they are starting to flesh and grow the core team as well as fund some of the open source projects/devs that the ecosystem relies on (https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/12/15/sponsoring-open-source-developers https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/12/15/sponsoring-open-source...). Add to this a lot of people are changing jobs and pushing for using more alternative languages or exploring new languages and as a result many people are building in what they want instead of what they are forced to use at work. The sibling comment about roam is a good example as they have had a lot of press lately.

iLemming 6y ago

At least a dozen big companies are running on large Clojure codebases: Apple, Cisco, Walmart Labs, Funding Circle, Nubank, Metabase, CircleCI, Grammarly, to name a few. Many smaller companies built their entire businesses using Clojure stack. The days when Clojure was just "a toy to impress your friends" are long gone. It's a mature ecosystem for the serious craft. Today it's the most widely used FP language; it has gained popularity and doing better than OCaml, Erlang/Elixir, Elm, Haskell, F#, and even Scala. Clojure is slowly but steadily growing. Without any support from the big players. I think the core Clojure team has fewer people than teams at Facebook and Google for front-end libraries like React and Angular. Podcasts are being recorded, books published, conferences organized. Skeptics often criticize "not growing, small but very vocal community", they call it "a cult of Rich Hickey" and pronounce the language to be dying. The truth is - many companies realizing the incredible pragmatism of ideas behind Clojure.

dominotw 6y ago
> The truth is - many companies realizing the incredible pragmatism of ideas behind Clojure. My employer is moving away from cljoure after 100% of the stack on clojure/clojurescript for over 10 yrs. All the companies that you mentioned ( with the exception of nubank) adopted Clojure years ago. Curious to know if there are new companies picking clojure, your comment seems to imply so.
- pivo 6y ago
  > My employer is moving away from cljoure I'd be interested in why that is if you have a moment to write a bit about it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- iLemming 6y ago
  I'm not an investor or someone whose job is to track companies and their tech stacks (I can't list them here), but there are many, many medium and small startups that adopted Clojure not too long ago (especially in European countries). Pitch.com was founded in 2018, Clubhouse.io, Metabase in 2014; Ladder in 2015; Flexiana, Watchful.io in 2016. Mind that these are official dates when the companies were established, some took at least a year, two, or even more to get going. Your case is anecdotal, and I bet it has little to do with Clojure itself and primarily is driven by some other factors. There are tons of talks from various Clojure conferences on Youtube, where the speakers come from different startups.
nojito 6y ago
>Today it's the most widely used FP language; it has gained popularity and doing better than OCaml, Erlang/Elixir, Elm, Haskell, F#, and even Scala. I find it very hard to believe that clojure is beating out F#. F# has been included in the .NET runtime. Anyone who has c# automagically has f# available to them. Do you have a source to your claim? edit: guess not
- iLemming 6y ago

ithrow 6y ago

Lisps are cool, Clojure is cool but that's about it, just like Scheme is cool. HN probably has the biggest crowd of devs that know (and like) Lisps, even if they don't use it for everyday things. Anything about Lisps gets upvoted quickly but if you look at Clojure posts here in HN, you'll see that all the comments don't really have any substance (also, look at the point to comments ratio of Clojure posts.).