Why? The things people often list above language are table stakes. I wouldn't give up a high salary to work in Clojure for a low salary, but that's not a choice

Why? The things people often list above language are table stakes. I wouldn't give up a high salary to work in Clojure for a low salary, but that's not a choice you have to make. I wouldn't give up interesting problems, fully paid insurance, a good team, 4+ weeks of vacation, etc but again I don't have to give up any of those to work in Clojure. The choice isn't some ideologically pure Clojure startup scraping by versus proper pay + benefits at a large enterprise. If you're doing application development, it's nice to have a language that truly cares about backwards compatibility and interoperability with a common platform. It means I can focus on solving problems and not incidental complexity. I can easily hack Clojure from the comfort of a pom.xml if necessary. I'm not working in Clojure right now because I found interesting work outside of application development, but when I was last looking in 2018, I could get roughly all of the things I wanted from a job and still hack Clojure from a CIDER REPL in Emacs all day.