Minor quibble, OTP _used_ to stand for Open Telecom Platform but that acronym was removed in the push to open-source. Ericson had hoped to sell the Open Telecom

Minor quibble, OTP _used_ to stand for Open Telecom Platform but that acronym was removed in the push to open-source. Ericson had hoped to sell the Open Telecom Platform to other telecoms but that didn't work out, hence the modern Erlang/OTP. Anyhow, Erlang's niche was and is fault-tolerant middleware, yeah, the kind of thing you see deep in the bowels of systems. The community built up a sizable bulk of code to support the kind of middleware you'd find in Enterprise-y type places in the early 2000s and then slowly started to fall off, leaving an ecosystem that slowly bit-rotted in much the same way you describe in your article. That, specifically, is what I'm referring to as the off-the-shelf rot problem. Perhaps I could have been more clear. I agree with the argument that Clojure was intended to be a general purpose kind of language, but I think you article also suggests that -- unless you're tied to a JVM model _and_ you refuse to use Java -- that Clojure gets out-competed by languages like Go in that kind of work. It's not clear to me how or why building a Rails kind of thing for Clojure would reverse this situation. I think, also, the size of an online community and tally of companies can be misleading. Erlang's IRC and company use was at an all-time high even while the actual pool of developers had reached its peak and was declining, slowly but surely. It's argument from analogy, sure, but what you're describing in the article for Clojure looks damn familiar from my time with Erlang, pre-Elixir.