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Ask HN: Is Clojure Dead?

Hi, I don't see much about clojure over past 2 years or so. Same goes for other industry functional languages (e.g. elixir, scala, F#). Are they just in later stages of hype cycle or are they dying out the same way perl did? For better or worse most of news/fuzz these days seem to be about Rust (not that this translates to actual job postings though). PS: Asking because I want to delve into a functional language but I cannot bring myself to do this seriously if it doesn't translate into market value.

freshhawk 4y ago
This is why it's a bad idea to evaluate software technologies entirely by what shows up in the social media hype cycle news. The only metric you learn from that is "what's the new fad that I can get attention by writing about because people are eager to form an opinion about this brand new thing". Probably a much better idea to not choose a language at the "tons of posts about it" phase of the lifecycle. Pick something that enough people actually use that it is considered too boring to be the hot new thing.
jstx1 4y ago
1. No. 2. These languages were never very popular to begin with. "I was seeing more HN posts about it in the past" doesn't equate to "the language was popular before and now it's dead.
- thisiswrongggg 4y ago
  Thanks for the answer! About 2. It's not only HN (but I get your point which is why it could be that they are less talked about and more used). Waht worries me is the LinkedIn job ads for clojurists.
  - smcn 4y ago
    Learning functional programming will add value to any programming language that you use as you'll have more strings to your bow, so to speak. You may not get a job writing Clojure, but you'll be able to bring the concepts you learn to any job you do get. For what it's worth, I do see some jobs for Clojure in the UK and EU on LinkedIn, not as much as other programming languages, but enough that I think I could get one if I were looking for a Clojure job.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Probably LinkedIn is not the best place to find Clojure jobs. Most of the jobs I've gotten has been because of word-to-mouth. Getting into the ecosystem and contributing patches/features to libraries/projects is your best bet to be considered for positions. Second to that, there are dedicated job sites for Clojure (like https://jobs.braveclojure.com/ https://jobs.braveclojure.com/). Thirdly, the #remote-jobs / #jobs channel on the Clojurists Slack is very good to find jobs too.
    - seancorfield 4y ago
      Yes, definitely this. So many jobs are found through referrals and networking, especially for non-mainstream tech. That said, I was pleasantly surprised recently by a search on LinkedIn for Clojure and found some big household names hiring (including several large banks who most people think of as being very conservative).
    - joshlemer 4y ago
      I don't know, you could say the same thing about more popular languages as well. Lots of people get jobs in Java roles from their personal connections. The difference in postings between Clojure and more mainstream languages like Python and Java is multiple orders of magnitude. Clojure has about 500 job postings on LinkedIn in the united states. Compare with Python which has about 750,000, literally 1500 times as many jobs. The number of roles in all of Canada for Clojure is about 40 on LinkedIn, easily less than the number of applications a job hunter could send out in a day.
pyb 4y ago
Clojure is not dead, the core language is still very strong, but the dev experience has been degrading IME. This is due to a lack of heavy corporate backing and investment, probably by choice. Taking a PL to the mainstream is very expensive. You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies.
- dudul 4y ago
  > You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies. That's actually why it is interesting to compare them. Comparing things that are the same would quickly become very boring.
  - pyb 4y ago
    What I mean is that you can only maybe compare them in a vacuum. For a concrete given task, "is Clojure or Rust better" rarely comes up because there is little overlap in application domains. For instance, one domain where Clojure shines is for complex web apps, as your frontend and backend are in the same language, and can be tightly integrated. I believe dustingetz is working on taking this to the next level.
- tsm 4y ago
  Do you have examples of the dev experience degrading? My experiences is that the tools and libraries only continue to mature (as does the Clojure language itself). Do you just mean that things are improving less quickly than they are for, e.g., Typescript?
  - pyb 4y ago
    I mean compared to a few years ago. I tried setting up a new project after 1 or 2 years away from the ecosystem, and struggled a lot : all existing templates to set up new projects (esp. with CLJ/CLJS combined) had bitrotten and were not usable out of the box ; emacs integration no longer working out of the box, etc. I think it's a "death by a 1000 cuts"/"broken windows" that is may be happening when the ecosystem lacks funding to take care of the boring maintenancey stuff. If I remember well, this is a conscious choice by Rich Hickey, a choice that one should respect, but will prevent Clojure from ever getting to the next level IMO.
capableweb 4y ago
Some languages judge popularity based on "freshness", others on "quality" and others on other values, like "usage in enterprise" and other variables. JavaScript ecosystem typically goes by "freshness" and "vanity stats", like GitHub stars or NPM downloads. An average JavaScript developer would check out a GitHub repository and look when the last commit was made, and if it's more than a year ago, decide the project might be too old and possibly abandon, and hence not look further into it. In contrast, the Clojure ecosystem typically goes by "stability", "maintainability" (simplicity") and therefore age or "last commit" matter less. The average Clojure developer will first look into the code of the repository and make the choice to use it based on the code quality. That the project/library hasn't changed the last year or two matters less and might even be a sign of maturity, that the library is "done" so to say. As a ex-JavaScript developer (together with many other languages) and now full-time Clojure(Script) developer since a couple of years back, I can only say that the community and ecosystem is more alive than ever, and there is no shortage of either jobs or candidates when you're either looking for work or looking to hire Clojure developers. Yes, the pay is way more as a Clojure developer, which also means a typical Clojure developer is more expensive to hire than say a JavaScript developer. But for projects where I usually had to hire 2-3 JavaScript developers to hit any sort of interesting development velocity, I find it enough to just hire another Clojure contributor to really hit the ground running. The real value in writing and maintaining Clojure programs is developer ergonomics. There is no other language that hits as many points as Clojure when it comes to make it simple to write efficient and easy to understand programs. Having your editor connected to a REPL and being able to send code back/forward between the running state of your entire program is such a super power that it's hard to write anything else than Clojure after you've gotten used to it. However, biggest drawback is that you're gonna have to deal with the JVM sooner or later. When I first dove into Clojure, I had no idea about the Java nor JVM ecosystem, at all, so in the beginning, it took some getting used to the whole thing. But, you don't really have to touch Java the language, mostly details around the JVM, and there is a lot of documentation/material around understanding the JVM, so it's not hard per se. Overall, before I discovered Clojure programming was mundane and I owe the fun in programming to Clojure wholesale. Now it's hard to do anything else but Clojure. But I'd still recommend anyone curious about functional programming, live editing of programs and lisps in general to give it a serious try. I probably wouldn't be programming anymore if it wasn't for Clojure. That I get paid more than my peers because I do Clojure/Script is just another point for the language, but that's not the main point for me at all.
fm2606 4y ago
I am learning Clojure right now and I can relate to the feeling of not wanting to put time and effort into it if there is no marketable value in return. One thing that is motivating me is I read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it). The other thing that is motivating me is that this type of programming and thinking is completely different to mainstream PLs. It is a fun and challenging exercise and my hope is that it will benefit me in "normal" PL like everyone says it will. I do have a vague (unrealistic??) idea of maybe getting a PT job using Clojure after studying for a year or so. PT because my FT job has amazing benefits and career potential. We will see. As of right now I am just enjoying learning Clojure and Lisp-style language.
- the-alchemist 4y ago
  Funny, I was just looking for a PT clojure dev.
- miguendes 4y ago
  Forgive my ignorance but what is a PT and FT job?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Full-time/Part-time job.
- eggsyntax 4y ago
  > read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it) I'm not having any luck finding it -- if you find yourself more eager (heh) I'd love to get a link.
pritambarhate 4y ago
Here is the Google Trends Comparison of Clojure, F#, Rust and Scala. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,F%23,%2Fm%2F0dsbpg6,%2Fm%2F091hdj https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN&q=%2Fm%2F03y... Rust is 4-5 times more popular in searches that Clojure and F#. Interestingly Scala is around 3 times more popular than Rust in searches.
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  The region is set to India though. If you set it to worldwide Rust is much more popular.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Not sure why "Rust" is part of the comparison there either, it is not a functional language by most definitions, although some parts have functional interfaces.
    - nequo 4y ago
      OP mentioned Rust as a language that has been more talked about. GP brought some data to support that.
    - moomin 4y ago
      You’re right that it’s not a functional language, but its type system and developer experience has proved very attractive to a lot of people who normally are drawn to Haskell.
- edumucelli 4y ago
  If you are India ("geo=IN" in the URL), then you are correct. If not, then it is not.
- oytis 4y ago
  Unrelated, but interesting to see C++ overshadowing all of them, even if you look over larger time intervals seemingly without any signs of decline.
GianFabien 4y ago
Depends on how you judge a language's "liveliness". Hacker surveys or job postings? In Sydney, Australia C# and Java have the greatest number of job listings.
hk1337 4y ago
One benefit of learning functional languages, whether Haskell or Clojure, is that it makes you a better developer in other, non-functional, languages.
- jbn 4y ago
  can you clarify "how" it makes one a better developer? When I think of how the java streams API is used, it generates lots of garbage (i.e. lots of intermediary allocs), doesn't always make things clearer.. i'm genuinely curious (and in fact i like the streams API, it's just often misused by collecting at the wrong step..).
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    Your programmer’s worldview will expand, you’ll learn new ways of doing things.
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    I think it helps you better understand how data flows through you program. My input is A, and I need to create D. A -> A', then another function makes B, then another makes C, then another makes D. You can reason about and relatively easily test each of these steps. However, testing in a repl gets quite messy with calls such as h(g(f(x))). In python, you'd need to decorate you functions with an input/output logger.
    - Yekrats 4y ago
      Testing in a repl is easier and not messy at all if you use the Clojure arrow macro: (-> x f g h) You can see each step clearly, and build each result on top of what you did previously.
  - nequo 4y ago
    > When I think of how the java streams API is used, it generates lots of garbage (i.e. lots of intermediary allocs) Not extremely relevant because it’s Lean 4 and not Java, but destructive updates can help with that: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05647.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05647.pdf Edit: Now linking to the right paper.
johannboehme 4y ago
Clojure is definitely not dead. There are active Clojure user groups in most countries (even in my little region) and i still (or even more than ever) stumble uppon cool and exiting projects and libs (e.g. https://github.com/borkdude https://github.com/borkdude. It's just incredible what a surplus value this dude alone provides to the ecosystem) Clojure may not have the biggest audience but like others said, it generally focuses more on stability, so using libraries that haven't been updated a while is more of a plus-point and don't mean they are outdated. Personally speaking, Clojure really brought back the joy of programming and i would never willingly go back to developing in a language without a REPL. The tight feedback loop you have while molding a running program in your editor and the constant dopamine drip feed it causes are just too addictive.
- sshine 4y ago
  "Dead" is a strong word. Languages that reach the maturity Clojure has never die, they become undying. There are active Perl groups in some countries. Perl is so undying. Clojure less so, but... It's a spectrum where Clojure neither has massive adoption (1.51% in SO's 2022 survey [0]) or rapid community growth (compared to hyped or massively adopted technologies). Clojure is listed as the top paying language in StackOverflow's 2022 survey. Clojure is an acquired taste. And it isn't a bad one, either! [0]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/
- eggsyntax 4y ago
  > It's just incredible what a surplus value this dude alone provides to the ecosystem) Seconded; it's pretty jaw-dropping! > The tight feedback loop you have while molding a running program in your editor and the constant dopamine drip feed it causes are just too addictive. Well-said -- I've been needing to write some Python recently, and it's only redoubled my preference for Clojure; the Python shell is a poor substitute at best for the Clojure REPL :(
  - joshlemer 4y ago
    I found it pretty easy to set up a Python REPL in VS Code, which would allow me to do similar things to the Clojure REPL such as highlighting some text in the editor and evaluating. All in all it was pretty close. I guess the only thing that is really different is that it was not connected to the same process I'm debugging, but a different python process. Is that the main thing you're missing?
moomin 4y ago
I’m going to be a contrarian here: the answer is yes. Yes there commercial jobs out there, yes there are big names that use it, but it’s an increasingly insular community, it’s ceased growing, a lot of people have moved on, and it never really found a niche. Established programming languages never “die” in the sense of dropping to zero, but to the extent that the question is meaningful, Clojure’s dead.
- sgt 4y ago
  A lot of living languages are based around insular communities. Clojure just fits a niche (people who want a general purpose LISP on the JVM), that's all. I can't be sure though since I am not a Clojure developer.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    Clojure goes out of its way to be insular. Creating a PR upstream requires you to have been given access explicitly from Rich Hickey (or whoever admins their Gitlab instance). The Clojurians slack is invite-only. etc.
    - carnundotcom 4y ago
      I can't speak to developing the language, but Clojurians (a very welcoming and helpful community!) is definitely not invite-only. Linked here alongside other resources: https://clojure.org/community/resources https://clojure.org/community/resources Oh, and there's a #clojure-dev channel.
      - ironmagma 4y ago
        My bad, I must have just not been using Slack right.
    - sgt 4y ago
      You think Java of C# (originally) is any better?
jmartin2683 4y ago
Closure is weird if you’re not already into lisps (I know, I know our fathers’ parentheses). It’s not easy to just pick up and start solving problems, because everything feels foreign. I don’t know if it’s dead or not, as I’m sure people still love to use it… it just doesn’t have any major upside that’d make me want to adopt it. Rust, as you’ve mentioned, is the opposite… huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt, so no surprise it’s getting more talk these days.
- cutler 4y ago
  I managed to avoid being OOP-ed at the beginning of my programming career when I discovered "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl and "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall. It was a close call as I shared a house with a Java programmer who swore Java was the future. Perl was much cooler so I stayed with it and when Clojure appeared it was that much easier to learn, not having to de-OOP myself.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > [Clojure is] not easy to just pick up and start solving problems > [Rust has] huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt Probably this depends wildly on the person, but I found the opposite to be true. I had bunch of languages under my belt before I learned Clojure, but none of them functional nor s-expressions, so Clojure was very different than the ones I knew. Took some while to get used to, but after a couple of months I was more efficient than I ever was in any other language. On the other hand, Rust took longer time to be as efficient as other languages I knew, even though it was on the surface more similar to what I knew since before. So for me personally, it was easier to become efficient with Clojure, even with 0 experience with lisps or the JVM, compared to Rust. I think it's mostly about the surface-area of what you can learn to become efficient. Once you understand s-expressions, there is not much to Clojure, besides memorizing various APIs, but that's easy. With Rust, there is so much syntax to remember, and other rules to follow, while in Clojure the syntax is really simple, so once you get it, you will never fight with what the right syntax is again.
- yenda 4y ago
  The lisp syntax was my original reason to accept Clojure. You might need a few days to get used to it, but it is far less than any other syntax, and it quickly falls into your muscle memory in a way no other syntax can. Within weeks you master a handful of basic parens manipulation that are all you need to edit and navigate code. That means that you are 100% focus on implementing your solution to a problem instead of switching between doing that and crafting your solution into an alien syntax, assisted by an ide
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Nelkins 4y ago
Can't speak to the others, but I'm pretty sure the F# team just doubled or tripled in size (it's still small though). Also the GitHub repo is very active: https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp .
bjourne 4y ago
Clojure is a wonderful language, but not so wonderful that I can tolerate its slow startup and compile times. I think lots of developers think the same way. Imo any language nit facilitating fast startup and compile is stillborn. Imo the same goes for any language requiring you to setup a "project" or something to get started.
- didibus 4y ago
  Slow compile times? You don't even need to compile Clojure to run it. It only has slow start time, but since you work at an always connected REPL, it's pretty much instantanuous throughout your entire work day. Start it in the morning (takes a few seconds at most), and then it's instant feedback until you clock out. And for slow start time for deployment use cases that need fast start time, like CLIs, scripts, serverless, you can either use babashka, Clojurescript, or compile Clojure to native using GraalVM.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Yeah, Clojure is not great for CLIs, but pretty much every other use case it excels at. For CLIs, there is always Babashka (https://babashka.org/ https://babashka.org/) which works good enough. For local development, you usually just compile+eval one function at a time as you change them, and those happens under 1ms, not enough to even notice (unless you develop with a remote REPL, but then network is to blame) For server usage, you usually compile once in CI and put the resulting binary/JAR on the server. A few seconds for startup matters less in those cases. The drama of slow Clojure startup is wildly overblown, because basically for no other use case than writing CLIs, does the startup time matter so much it becomes a problem.
  - seancorfield 4y ago
    Indeed, yes. For development, if you're finding "slow startup" to be a problem, you're just doing it wrong: start a REPL and leave it running -- mine run for days (or even weeks).
    - synthc 4y ago
aynyc 4y ago
It's not DEAD as in no one is using it. A good friend who's crazy into Clojure still gets pinged a lot about Clojure jobs, but most of them are asking him to port Clojure to something else. Even he admits that as other languages' ecosystems continue to grow, Clojure is slowly being pushed to the background. He just finished a job to port Clojure to Python on some financial processing engine.
synthc 4y ago
I would not say it is dead at all. There are still Clojure jobs and new companies using Clojure. It is a niche language, and I think it will stay a niche language, but that is fine.
eggsyntax 4y ago
I can say that I (like many others) have built a thriving career on Clojure. I like to change jobs every couple of years, and I've never yet had any trouble finding a Clojure job I'm excited about (and I only consider well-paid remote jobs with friendly teams with companies doing something I feel good about). The community is mostly active on the Clojurians slack (currently ~24,000 users) and clojureverse.org. So -- it's a niche for sure, but a very successful niche, and one that many people are very happy in. There aren't a ton of jobs out there relative to, say, Python, but there are also fewer people competing for those jobs, so it works out fine for individuals. It can be tricky to find your first Clojure job, but I think that's true in most languages. I plan to stick with it for the foreseeable future, because there's no other language that I like nearly as much, or can be nearly as productive in.
- nextos 4y ago
  What domains are you using Clojure in?
  - eggsyntax 4y ago
    So far: complex data visualization, transportation logistics, voting-related nonprofit, medical research, and augmented analytics. I like to explore new domains :)
    - jackdbd 4y ago
      Could you expand a bit on data visualization and medical research? Did you develop libraries in these fields? Thanks!
  - rippeltippel 4y ago
    Banking (e.g. Nubank) and other high stakes applications (e.g. JUXT). In my small experience, I've been using Clojure for nearly 4 years to implement real-time ML pipelines.
pwinnski 4y ago
For the US, Google Trends reveals that Clojure's heyday came in 2013, and it has been on a decline since[0]. It never really reached the interest level of Scala, and of course recently Rust is consuming all the air in the room. Except, just for kicks I add Golang, and it turns out that all of the above are marginal compared to Go[1]. HN posts are very different from general interest, but yeah, I'd go with "Clojure has sadly missed on its shot to become a popular general-purpose language" rather than "Clojure is dead," but your instincts seem right. 0. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,%2Fm%2F0dsbpg6,%2Fm%2F091hdj https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... 1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,%2Fm%2F0dsbpg6,%2Fm%2F091hdj,%2Fm%2F09gbxjr https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
- seancorfield 4y ago
  Clojure never had a "shot to become a popular general-purpose language". That was never its goal. Popularity is not a useful measure of whether something is actually good technology. Clojure is designed to solve hard problems, for people who want something objectively "better" than mainstream tools. That's why it tends to attract more senior developers -- people who've felt the pain of other languages and want something better -- although we also see a steady stream of new developers who are interested in better tools even before they've felt that pain. Of course it's niche -- it's a Lisp! It's alien. It's "too different" for many companies or many developers to even consider it. And that's fine. The space is big enough for niche languages to thrive and for developers to build careers on them, if they wish to do so.
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anotherhue 4y ago
"Lisp is no more dead than usual"
blain_the_train 4y ago
Even in the most naive models your "market value" is based off Demand (how many jobs) AND supply (how many people can do the job), you need to be concerned about the ratio, not one side or the other. If Pytyon has 100 jobs and 100 people then the ratio is 1 If Clojure has 10 jobs and 5 people then the ration is 2 and Clojure has a healthier market for you then python.
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
Clojure is the 3rd most liked [0] and 1st top paying [1] technology on the 2022 Stack Overflow survey. [0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-loved-... [1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-...
hackarama 4y ago
Dead, too many parentheses.
slifin 4y ago
Some of my favourite recent bits in Clojure: https://www.hyperfiddle.net/ https://www.hyperfiddle.net/ https://pathom3.wsscode.com/ https://pathom3.wsscode.com/ https://github.com/HealthSamurai/matcho https://github.com/HealthSamurai/matcho Just got my second job in Clojure nearly getting on for double my before Clojure salary
reducesuffering 4y ago
Typescript, Python, Kotlin, C#, Rust, Swift, Go. In that order, these are the >1% marketshare langs for new projects that aren't maintenance-mode in the next decade.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
I moved away from Clojure to Common Lisp. The Clojure culture doesn't take seriously developer experience, good documentation, easy getting started pages etc. Plus you have to deal with the JVM and slow compile cycles. Compared to that Steel Bank Common Lisp is rock solid and just works. Even the libraries and documentation are fewer but better. I did learn a lot from watching Rich Hickey's talks so there's that.
- kovrik 4y ago
  Really? I have the opposite experience. I _want_ to love CL but Clojure wins when it comes to IDE support and libs and documentation. Maybe it's just me but I find (SB)CL tooling to be very obscure: ASDF, QuickLisp, Roswell etc. My main issue with it is that it's all written in CL itself and doesn't provide handy CLI tools to execute common tasks (compile app, build package, run tests, deploy etc.). Not to mention that documentation is horrendous. Basically, I want it to have something like Maven/Gradle/Leiningen to manage dependencies, run tasks and so on. Am I missing something?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    ros init and ros build should be everything. And emacs for the tooling. Quicklisp for dependency management. Having said that even CL is not perfect. Something like https://fresh.deno.dev/ https://fresh.deno.dev/ is so much better when it comes to presentation and ease of use.
- hedgehog0 4y ago
  I use CL and am currently learning Clojure. I think there are generally more libraries for Clojure and better communities (in some way). Maybe it's due to the JVM, I dunno.
- johannboehme 4y ago
  Just to leave some hints for people. - If you don't want to deal with the JVM, Clojure also runs on the Web and .NET. - If you develop with the REPL you don't have compile cycles - Or just use Babashka (no compilation needed)
dragandj 4y ago
I find this hard to believe. I believe you that you haven't see much about Clojure over past 2 years of so. But the cause might be that you simply haven't looked at Clojure in the past 2 years of so. OTOH, I've seen plenty of Clojure in the same 2 years. Perhaps most of news/fuzz is about Rust, but I haven't seen much of that, since I'm not following the news sources that talk about that. In the end, it depends what you want to do. If you want a great programming language with vast ecosystem and decent number of job opportunities, Clojure is still the thing. If you wish to participate in the most mainstream thing, I believe the Python/Java/Javascript is the answer. But then you're competing with 30 million of other job seekers there. Perhaps Clojure can't rival the Cardashians or Lady Gagas of this world in the amount of news (for better or worse).
- bsder 4y ago
  Clojure has probably had its heyday, but it's quite far from dead. The main issue is that there are other JVM languages nowadays that don't suck--that wasn't the case back in 2009. So, if you wanted the Java ecosystem but didn't want Java, your choices were quite limited. You had Scala (just ... no) and Groovy (oh, hell, no) and ... Clojure. Since then, Java, itself, has gotten a lot better, and there have become a plethora of JVM languages since. In addition, a lot of languages now have "package managers" like lein. They have also adopted "default const-ness". So, a lot of the issue is that things that were unique to Clojure are no longer that unique in this generation of new languages. Finally, the JVM ecosystem doesn't have the same enterprise pull that it did 10 years ago ... enterprise installations back then only had the JVM, while now you can generally count on a version of Python also being installed. Computer language adoption is slow in spite of what everybody thinks. Pick a language that you can use as a tool for the future, and don't worry too much as long as it isn't actively un-popular. You'll have to learn a new computer language about once every 15 years anyway.
  - yogthos 4y ago
    Thing is that Clojure is a very different language from Java in pretty much every way. People who use Clojure are typically drawn to it because it's a Lisp and facilitates interactive development. I highly doubt that it's popularity is significantly affected by languages like Kotlin that try to be a better Java. If you're looking for a Lisp that you can use in production then Clojure is your best bet. This is the selling point of Clojure, and why it's unlikely to be displaced by newer JVM languages from its niche.
mindaslab 4y ago
I don't think it's dead. I am learning it, getting a lot of help from community. It's the best programming language I have seen.
tramav 4y ago
Clojure is very much alive. A dead language looks very different (Ceylon comes to my mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932085)
- thfuran 4y ago
  It's a shame Ceylon died.
oweiler 4y ago
Kotlin + Arrow is what you are looking for.
masukomi 4y ago
> PS: Asking because I want to delve into a functional language but I cannot bring myself to do this seriously if it doesn't translate into market value. learn a functional language because you want to learn a functional language. Learn whatever one sparks your interest. It doesn't matter what one you learn because NONE of them have notable share in the job market. If you learn _any_ functional language you'll have a leg up on other applicants for _any_ functional language job because hardly anyone bothers to learn them. Also, there are so few jobs in functional programming that you're unlikely to get one anyway. So, again, just learn what you want to learn.
invalidOrTaken 4y ago
*procrastinates working @ his clojure job to browse hn*
xmlblog 4y ago
I mean... 1. https://clojure.org/news/news https://clojure.org/news/news 2. https://ask.clojure.org/ https://ask.clojure.org/ 3. https://groups.google.com/g/clojure https://groups.google.com/g/clojure 4. http://planet.clojure.in/ http://planet.clojure.in/ 5. https://twitter.com/i/communities/1494013093059432451 https://twitter.com/i/communities/1494013093059432451 ...make it seem as though reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
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yogthos 4y ago
Been using Clojure for over a decade now, and I see these articles at least once a year. The reality is that Clojure is used more than ever today, with more libraries, tools, and companies around it. It was a viable language for many years, and the situation only keeps improving in every way. Clojure simply doesn't have the hype around it because it's a mature and conservative language that's not chasing fads. This is a good thing because it's one of the most stable ecosystems I've had the pleasure to work with. If you're looking for a hip new language then Clojure is probably not for you, but if you're looking to actually get work done using one of the best languages around then look no further.
Jeaye 4y ago
Clojure is not dead. As a measure of community, the Slack workspace has around 25k members in it right now. Even more, Clojure lives on through its various dialects: ClojureScript (JS), Clojure CLR, Clojerl (Erlang), Fennel (Lua), jank (LLVM C++), Ferret (LLVM C++), Babashka, Squint, and so on. Definitely worth learning, as it will expand your mind; Rich Hickey's talks are some of the most influential I've ever seen.
joeevans1000 4y ago
C'mon. Just try a function. It's on me, no charge.
zmibes 4y ago
Plenty of anicdata here - so here my 2p: I started with Clojure about 5 years ago. Since then the community, tooling and job options have bloomed from my perspective. This could be an illusion caused by becoming gradually more immersed in it. Clojure will not die for now, for the same reason that it remains nieche - it's a lisp. Arguably the only viable full stack web dev lisp. And lispers gonna lisp. If that speaks to you on a philosophical/aesthetic level then go for it, you will be in good company. If you want to try to time the hype market then truly best of luck. However, I think choosing to invest in a language that works for you and your way of thinking will be a less fragile strategy. I'll keep Clojuring for a while at least, because it's a pleasure. Because it lets me reason where other languages would have me memorise. I find memorising syntax tedious. It's not a silver bullet of course - some things just make more sense for to do in a c/rust type procedural language.
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rippeltippel 4y ago
According to the the last StackOverflow Developer Survey [1], Clojure is the third most-loved language and the top-paid one. Having writing Clojure daily for nearly 4 years, my experience fully confirms that survey. I also noticed the apparent silence around Clojure and its community, which looks like a paradox to me [2]. The Clojure community is actually active and very supportive (the Clojurians channel on Slack incredibly helpful) but it's also very much low profile. Rich Hickey created Clojure as an independent developer and without extra funding. He's a great speaker, but likely didn't benefit from all the marketing channels available to more popular languages designed in more corporate enviroments, such as Rust and Go. Being a LISP dialect, Clojure is also quite niche (not the first language you'd learn at school/uni) and definitely not academic, but extremely pragmatical. Learning Clojure was quite mind bending at first, and I often wondered by my more experienced colleagues kept saying how expressive it is. I now see their point, and get paid quite well for having spent time learning it. [1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ [2] https://piero.github.io/stories/2022/06/23/the-clojure-paradox.html https://piero.github.io/stories/2022/06/23/the-clojure-parad...

freshhawk 4y ago

This is why it's a bad idea to evaluate software technologies entirely by what shows up in the social media hype cycle news. The only metric you learn from that is "what's the new fad that I can get attention by writing about because people are eager to form an opinion about this brand new thing". Probably a much better idea to not choose a language at the "tons of posts about it" phase of the lifecycle. Pick something that enough people actually use that it is considered too boring to be the hot new thing.

jstx1 4y ago

1. No. 2. These languages were never very popular to begin with. "I was seeing more HN posts about it in the past" doesn't equate to "the language was popular before and now it's dead.

thisiswrongggg 4y ago
Thanks for the answer! About 2. It's not only HN (but I get your point which is why it could be that they are less talked about and more used). Waht worries me is the LinkedIn job ads for clojurists.
- smcn 4y ago
  Learning functional programming will add value to any programming language that you use as you'll have more strings to your bow, so to speak. You may not get a job writing Clojure, but you'll be able to bring the concepts you learn to any job you do get. For what it's worth, I do see some jobs for Clojure in the UK and EU on LinkedIn, not as much as other programming languages, but enough that I think I could get one if I were looking for a Clojure job.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Probably LinkedIn is not the best place to find Clojure jobs. Most of the jobs I've gotten has been because of word-to-mouth. Getting into the ecosystem and contributing patches/features to libraries/projects is your best bet to be considered for positions. Second to that, there are dedicated job sites for Clojure (like https://jobs.braveclojure.com/ https://jobs.braveclojure.com/). Thirdly, the #remote-jobs / #jobs channel on the Clojurists Slack is very good to find jobs too.
  - seancorfield 4y ago
    Yes, definitely this. So many jobs are found through referrals and networking, especially for non-mainstream tech. That said, I was pleasantly surprised recently by a search on LinkedIn for Clojure and found some big household names hiring (including several large banks who most people think of as being very conservative).
  - joshlemer 4y ago
    I don't know, you could say the same thing about more popular languages as well. Lots of people get jobs in Java roles from their personal connections. The difference in postings between Clojure and more mainstream languages like Python and Java is multiple orders of magnitude. Clojure has about 500 job postings on LinkedIn in the united states. Compare with Python which has about 750,000, literally 1500 times as many jobs. The number of roles in all of Canada for Clojure is about 40 on LinkedIn, easily less than the number of applications a job hunter could send out in a day.

pyb 4y ago

Clojure is not dead, the core language is still very strong, but the dev experience has been degrading IME. This is due to a lack of heavy corporate backing and investment, probably by choice. Taking a PL to the mainstream is very expensive. You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies.

dudul 4y ago
> You cannot compare Clojure and Rust in any way as they're completely different design philosophies. That's actually why it is interesting to compare them. Comparing things that are the same would quickly become very boring.
- pyb 4y ago
  What I mean is that you can only maybe compare them in a vacuum. For a concrete given task, "is Clojure or Rust better" rarely comes up because there is little overlap in application domains. For instance, one domain where Clojure shines is for complex web apps, as your frontend and backend are in the same language, and can be tightly integrated. I believe dustingetz is working on taking this to the next level.
tsm 4y ago
Do you have examples of the dev experience degrading? My experiences is that the tools and libraries only continue to mature (as does the Clojure language itself). Do you just mean that things are improving less quickly than they are for, e.g., Typescript?
- pyb 4y ago
  I mean compared to a few years ago. I tried setting up a new project after 1 or 2 years away from the ecosystem, and struggled a lot : all existing templates to set up new projects (esp. with CLJ/CLJS combined) had bitrotten and were not usable out of the box ; emacs integration no longer working out of the box, etc. I think it's a "death by a 1000 cuts"/"broken windows" that is may be happening when the ecosystem lacks funding to take care of the boring maintenancey stuff. If I remember well, this is a conscious choice by Rich Hickey, a choice that one should respect, but will prevent Clojure from ever getting to the next level IMO.

capableweb 4y ago

Some languages judge popularity based on "freshness", others on "quality" and others on other values, like "usage in enterprise" and other variables. JavaScript ecosystem typically goes by "freshness" and "vanity stats", like GitHub stars or NPM downloads. An average JavaScript developer would check out a GitHub repository and look when the last commit was made, and if it's more than a year ago, decide the project might be too old and possibly abandon, and hence not look further into it. In contrast, the Clojure ecosystem typically goes by "stability", "maintainability" (simplicity") and therefore age or "last commit" matter less. The average Clojure developer will first look into the code of the repository and make the choice to use it based on the code quality. That the project/library hasn't changed the last year or two matters less and might even be a sign of maturity, that the library is "done" so to say. As a ex-JavaScript developer (together with many other languages) and now full-time Clojure(Script) developer since a couple of years back, I can only say that the community and ecosystem is more alive than ever, and there is no shortage of either jobs or candidates when you're either looking for work or looking to hire Clojure developers. Yes, the pay is way more as a Clojure developer, which also means a typical Clojure developer is more expensive to hire than say a JavaScript developer. But for projects where I usually had to hire 2-3 JavaScript developers to hit any sort of interesting development velocity, I find it enough to just hire another Clojure contributor to really hit the ground running. The real value in writing and maintaining Clojure programs is developer ergonomics. There is no other language that hits as many points as Clojure when it comes to make it simple to write efficient and easy to understand programs. Having your editor connected to a REPL and being able to send code back/forward between the running state of your entire program is such a super power that it's hard to write anything else than Clojure after you've gotten used to it. However, biggest drawback is that you're gonna have to deal with the JVM sooner or later. When I first dove into Clojure, I had no idea about the Java nor JVM ecosystem, at all, so in the beginning, it took some getting used to the whole thing. But, you don't really have to touch Java the language, mostly details around the JVM, and there is a lot of documentation/material around understanding the JVM, so it's not hard per se. Overall, before I discovered Clojure programming was mundane and I owe the fun in programming to Clojure wholesale. Now it's hard to do anything else but Clojure. But I'd still recommend anyone curious about functional programming, live editing of programs and lisps in general to give it a serious try. I probably wouldn't be programming anymore if it wasn't for Clojure. That I get paid more than my peers because I do Clojure/Script is just another point for the language, but that's not the main point for me at all.

fm2606 4y ago

I am learning Clojure right now and I can relate to the feeling of not wanting to put time and effort into it if there is no marketable value in return. One thing that is motivating me is I read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it). The other thing that is motivating me is that this type of programming and thinking is completely different to mainstream PLs. It is a fun and challenging exercise and my hope is that it will benefit me in "normal" PL like everyone says it will. I do have a vague (unrealistic??) idea of maybe getting a PT job using Clojure after studying for a year or so. PT because my FT job has amazing benefits and career potential. We will see. As of right now I am just enjoying learning Clojure and Lisp-style language.

the-alchemist 4y ago
Funny, I was just looking for a PT clojure dev.
miguendes 4y ago
Forgive my ignorance but what is a PT and FT job?
- capableweb 4y ago
  Full-time/Part-time job.
eggsyntax 4y ago
> read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it) I'm not having any luck finding it -- if you find yourself more eager (heh) I'd love to get a link.

pritambarhate 4y ago

Here is the Google Trends Comparison of Clojure, F#, Rust and Scala. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,F%23,%2Fm%2F0dsbpg6,%2Fm%2F091hdj https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN&q=%2Fm%2F03y... Rust is 4-5 times more popular in searches that Clojure and F#. Interestingly Scala is around 3 times more popular than Rust in searches.

creakingstairs 4y ago
The region is set to India though. If you set it to worldwide Rust is much more popular.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Not sure why "Rust" is part of the comparison there either, it is not a functional language by most definitions, although some parts have functional interfaces.
  - nequo 4y ago
    OP mentioned Rust as a language that has been more talked about. GP brought some data to support that.
  - moomin 4y ago
    You’re right that it’s not a functional language, but its type system and developer experience has proved very attractive to a lot of people who normally are drawn to Haskell.
edumucelli 4y ago
If you are India ("geo=IN" in the URL), then you are correct. If not, then it is not.
oytis 4y ago
Unrelated, but interesting to see C++ overshadowing all of them, even if you look over larger time intervals seemingly without any signs of decline.

GianFabien 4y ago

Depends on how you judge a language's "liveliness". Hacker surveys or job postings? In Sydney, Australia C# and Java have the greatest number of job listings.

hk1337 4y ago

One benefit of learning functional languages, whether Haskell or Clojure, is that it makes you a better developer in other, non-functional, languages.

jbn 4y ago
can you clarify "how" it makes one a better developer? When I think of how the java streams API is used, it generates lots of garbage (i.e. lots of intermediary allocs), doesn't always make things clearer.. i'm genuinely curious (and in fact i like the streams API, it's just often misused by collecting at the wrong step..).
- Koshkin 4y ago
  Your programmer’s worldview will expand, you’ll learn new ways of doing things.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  I think it helps you better understand how data flows through you program. My input is A, and I need to create D. A -> A', then another function makes B, then another makes C, then another makes D. You can reason about and relatively easily test each of these steps. However, testing in a repl gets quite messy with calls such as h(g(f(x))). In python, you'd need to decorate you functions with an input/output logger.
  - Yekrats 4y ago
    Testing in a repl is easier and not messy at all if you use the Clojure arrow macro: (-> x f g h) You can see each step clearly, and build each result on top of what you did previously.
- nequo 4y ago
  > When I think of how the java streams API is used, it generates lots of garbage (i.e. lots of intermediary allocs) Not extremely relevant because it’s Lean 4 and not Java, but destructive updates can help with that: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05647.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05647.pdf Edit: Now linking to the right paper.

johannboehme 4y ago

Clojure is definitely not dead. There are active Clojure user groups in most countries (even in my little region) and i still (or even more than ever) stumble uppon cool and exiting projects and libs (e.g. https://github.com/borkdude https://github.com/borkdude. It's just incredible what a surplus value this dude alone provides to the ecosystem) Clojure may not have the biggest audience but like others said, it generally focuses more on stability, so using libraries that haven't been updated a while is more of a plus-point and don't mean they are outdated. Personally speaking, Clojure really brought back the joy of programming and i would never willingly go back to developing in a language without a REPL. The tight feedback loop you have while molding a running program in your editor and the constant dopamine drip feed it causes are just too addictive.

sshine 4y ago
"Dead" is a strong word. Languages that reach the maturity Clojure has never die, they become undying. There are active Perl groups in some countries. Perl is so undying. Clojure less so, but... It's a spectrum where Clojure neither has massive adoption (1.51% in SO's 2022 survey [0]) or rapid community growth (compared to hyped or massively adopted technologies). Clojure is listed as the top paying language in StackOverflow's 2022 survey. Clojure is an acquired taste. And it isn't a bad one, either! [0]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/
eggsyntax 4y ago
> It's just incredible what a surplus value this dude alone provides to the ecosystem) Seconded; it's pretty jaw-dropping! > The tight feedback loop you have while molding a running program in your editor and the constant dopamine drip feed it causes are just too addictive. Well-said -- I've been needing to write some Python recently, and it's only redoubled my preference for Clojure; the Python shell is a poor substitute at best for the Clojure REPL :(
- joshlemer 4y ago
  I found it pretty easy to set up a Python REPL in VS Code, which would allow me to do similar things to the Clojure REPL such as highlighting some text in the editor and evaluating. All in all it was pretty close. I guess the only thing that is really different is that it was not connected to the same process I'm debugging, but a different python process. Is that the main thing you're missing?

moomin 4y ago

I’m going to be a contrarian here: the answer is yes. Yes there commercial jobs out there, yes there are big names that use it, but it’s an increasingly insular community, it’s ceased growing, a lot of people have moved on, and it never really found a niche. Established programming languages never “die” in the sense of dropping to zero, but to the extent that the question is meaningful, Clojure’s dead.

sgt 4y ago
A lot of living languages are based around insular communities. Clojure just fits a niche (people who want a general purpose LISP on the JVM), that's all. I can't be sure though since I am not a Clojure developer.
- ironmagma 4y ago
  Clojure goes out of its way to be insular. Creating a PR upstream requires you to have been given access explicitly from Rich Hickey (or whoever admins their Gitlab instance). The Clojurians slack is invite-only. etc.
  - carnundotcom 4y ago
    I can't speak to developing the language, but Clojurians (a very welcoming and helpful community!) is definitely not invite-only. Linked here alongside other resources: https://clojure.org/community/resources https://clojure.org/community/resources Oh, and there's a #clojure-dev channel.
    - ironmagma 4y ago
      My bad, I must have just not been using Slack right.
  - sgt 4y ago
    You think Java of C# (originally) is any better?

jmartin2683 4y ago

Closure is weird if you’re not already into lisps (I know, I know our fathers’ parentheses). It’s not easy to just pick up and start solving problems, because everything feels foreign. I don’t know if it’s dead or not, as I’m sure people still love to use it… it just doesn’t have any major upside that’d make me want to adopt it. Rust, as you’ve mentioned, is the opposite… huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt, so no surprise it’s getting more talk these days.

cutler 4y ago
I managed to avoid being OOP-ed at the beginning of my programming career when I discovered "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl and "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall. It was a close call as I shared a house with a Java programmer who swore Java was the future. Perl was much cooler so I stayed with it and when Clojure appeared it was that much easier to learn, not having to de-OOP myself.
capableweb 4y ago
> [Clojure is] not easy to just pick up and start solving problems > [Rust has] huge upside out of the box and easy to adopt Probably this depends wildly on the person, but I found the opposite to be true. I had bunch of languages under my belt before I learned Clojure, but none of them functional nor s-expressions, so Clojure was very different than the ones I knew. Took some while to get used to, but after a couple of months I was more efficient than I ever was in any other language. On the other hand, Rust took longer time to be as efficient as other languages I knew, even though it was on the surface more similar to what I knew since before. So for me personally, it was easier to become efficient with Clojure, even with 0 experience with lisps or the JVM, compared to Rust. I think it's mostly about the surface-area of what you can learn to become efficient. Once you understand s-expressions, there is not much to Clojure, besides memorizing various APIs, but that's easy. With Rust, there is so much syntax to remember, and other rules to follow, while in Clojure the syntax is really simple, so once you get it, you will never fight with what the right syntax is again.
yenda 4y ago
The lisp syntax was my original reason to accept Clojure. You might need a few days to get used to it, but it is far less than any other syntax, and it quickly falls into your muscle memory in a way no other syntax can. Within weeks you master a handful of basic parens manipulation that are all you need to edit and navigate code. That means that you are 100% focus on implementing your solution to a problem instead of switching between doing that and crafting your solution into an alien syntax, assisted by an ide

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Nelkins 4y ago

Can't speak to the others, but I'm pretty sure the F# team just doubled or tripled in size (it's still small though). Also the GitHub repo is very active: https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp .

bjourne 4y ago

Clojure is a wonderful language, but not so wonderful that I can tolerate its slow startup and compile times. I think lots of developers think the same way. Imo any language nit facilitating fast startup and compile is stillborn. Imo the same goes for any language requiring you to setup a "project" or something to get started.

didibus 4y ago
Slow compile times? You don't even need to compile Clojure to run it. It only has slow start time, but since you work at an always connected REPL, it's pretty much instantanuous throughout your entire work day. Start it in the morning (takes a few seconds at most), and then it's instant feedback until you clock out. And for slow start time for deployment use cases that need fast start time, like CLIs, scripts, serverless, you can either use babashka, Clojurescript, or compile Clojure to native using GraalVM.
capableweb 4y ago
Yeah, Clojure is not great for CLIs, but pretty much every other use case it excels at. For CLIs, there is always Babashka (https://babashka.org/ https://babashka.org/) which works good enough. For local development, you usually just compile+eval one function at a time as you change them, and those happens under 1ms, not enough to even notice (unless you develop with a remote REPL, but then network is to blame) For server usage, you usually compile once in CI and put the resulting binary/JAR on the server. A few seconds for startup matters less in those cases. The drama of slow Clojure startup is wildly overblown, because basically for no other use case than writing CLIs, does the startup time matter so much it becomes a problem.
- seancorfield 4y ago
  Indeed, yes. For development, if you're finding "slow startup" to be a problem, you're just doing it wrong: start a REPL and leave it running -- mine run for days (or even weeks).
  - synthc 4y ago

aynyc 4y ago

It's not DEAD as in no one is using it. A good friend who's crazy into Clojure still gets pinged a lot about Clojure jobs, but most of them are asking him to port Clojure to something else. Even he admits that as other languages' ecosystems continue to grow, Clojure is slowly being pushed to the background. He just finished a job to port Clojure to Python on some financial processing engine.

synthc 4y ago

I would not say it is dead at all. There are still Clojure jobs and new companies using Clojure. It is a niche language, and I think it will stay a niche language, but that is fine.

eggsyntax 4y ago

I can say that I (like many others) have built a thriving career on Clojure. I like to change jobs every couple of years, and I've never yet had any trouble finding a Clojure job I'm excited about (and I only consider well-paid remote jobs with friendly teams with companies doing something I feel good about). The community is mostly active on the Clojurians slack (currently ~24,000 users) and clojureverse.org. So -- it's a niche for sure, but a very successful niche, and one that many people are very happy in. There aren't a ton of jobs out there relative to, say, Python, but there are also fewer people competing for those jobs, so it works out fine for individuals. It can be tricky to find your first Clojure job, but I think that's true in most languages. I plan to stick with it for the foreseeable future, because there's no other language that I like nearly as much, or can be nearly as productive in.

nextos 4y ago
What domains are you using Clojure in?
- eggsyntax 4y ago
  So far: complex data visualization, transportation logistics, voting-related nonprofit, medical research, and augmented analytics. I like to explore new domains :)
  - jackdbd 4y ago
    Could you expand a bit on data visualization and medical research? Did you develop libraries in these fields? Thanks!
- rippeltippel 4y ago
  Banking (e.g. Nubank) and other high stakes applications (e.g. JUXT). In my small experience, I've been using Clojure for nearly 4 years to implement real-time ML pipelines.

pwinnski 4y ago

For the US, Google Trends reveals that Clojure's heyday came in 2013, and it has been on a decline since[0]. It never really reached the interest level of Scala, and of course recently Rust is consuming all the air in the room. Except, just for kicks I add Golang, and it turns out that all of the above are marginal compared to Go[1]. HN posts are very different from general interest, but yeah, I'd go with "Clojure has sadly missed on its shot to become a popular general-purpose language" rather than "Clojure is dead," but your instincts seem right. 0. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,%2Fm%2F0dsbpg6,%2Fm%2F091hdj https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... 1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F03yb8hb,%2Fm%2F0dsbpg6,%2Fm%2F091hdj,%2Fm%2F09gbxjr https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

seancorfield 4y ago
Clojure never had a "shot to become a popular general-purpose language". That was never its goal. Popularity is not a useful measure of whether something is actually good technology. Clojure is designed to solve hard problems, for people who want something objectively "better" than mainstream tools. That's why it tends to attract more senior developers -- people who've felt the pain of other languages and want something better -- although we also see a steady stream of new developers who are interested in better tools even before they've felt that pain. Of course it's niche -- it's a Lisp! It's alien. It's "too different" for many companies or many developers to even consider it. And that's fine. The space is big enough for niche languages to thrive and for developers to build careers on them, if they wish to do so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

anotherhue 4y ago

"Lisp is no more dead than usual"

blain_the_train 4y ago

Even in the most naive models your "market value" is based off Demand (how many jobs) AND supply (how many people can do the job), you need to be concerned about the ratio, not one side or the other. If Pytyon has 100 jobs and 100 people then the ratio is 1 If Clojure has 10 jobs and 5 people then the ration is 2 and Clojure has a healthier market for you then python.

hcarvalhoalves 4y ago

Clojure is the 3rd most liked [0] and 1st top paying [1] technology on the 2022 Stack Overflow survey. [0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-loved-... [1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-...

hackarama 4y ago

Dead, too many parentheses.

slifin 4y ago

Some of my favourite recent bits in Clojure: https://www.hyperfiddle.net/ https://www.hyperfiddle.net/ https://pathom3.wsscode.com/ https://pathom3.wsscode.com/ https://github.com/HealthSamurai/matcho https://github.com/HealthSamurai/matcho Just got my second job in Clojure nearly getting on for double my before Clojure salary

reducesuffering 4y ago

Typescript, Python, Kotlin, C#, Rust, Swift, Go. In that order, these are the >1% marketshare langs for new projects that aren't maintenance-mode in the next decade.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

I moved away from Clojure to Common Lisp. The Clojure culture doesn't take seriously developer experience, good documentation, easy getting started pages etc. Plus you have to deal with the JVM and slow compile cycles. Compared to that Steel Bank Common Lisp is rock solid and just works. Even the libraries and documentation are fewer but better. I did learn a lot from watching Rich Hickey's talks so there's that.

kovrik 4y ago
Really? I have the opposite experience. I _want_ to love CL but Clojure wins when it comes to IDE support and libs and documentation. Maybe it's just me but I find (SB)CL tooling to be very obscure: ASDF, QuickLisp, Roswell etc. My main issue with it is that it's all written in CL itself and doesn't provide handy CLI tools to execute common tasks (compile app, build package, run tests, deploy etc.). Not to mention that documentation is horrendous. Basically, I want it to have something like Maven/Gradle/Leiningen to manage dependencies, run tasks and so on. Am I missing something?
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  ros init and ros build should be everything. And emacs for the tooling. Quicklisp for dependency management. Having said that even CL is not perfect. Something like https://fresh.deno.dev/ https://fresh.deno.dev/ is so much better when it comes to presentation and ease of use.
hedgehog0 4y ago
I use CL and am currently learning Clojure. I think there are generally more libraries for Clojure and better communities (in some way). Maybe it's due to the JVM, I dunno.
johannboehme 4y ago
Just to leave some hints for people. - If you don't want to deal with the JVM, Clojure also runs on the Web and .NET. - If you develop with the REPL you don't have compile cycles - Or just use Babashka (no compilation needed)

dragandj 4y ago

I find this hard to believe. I believe you that you haven't see much about Clojure over past 2 years of so. But the cause might be that you simply haven't looked at Clojure in the past 2 years of so. OTOH, I've seen plenty of Clojure in the same 2 years. Perhaps most of news/fuzz is about Rust, but I haven't seen much of that, since I'm not following the news sources that talk about that. In the end, it depends what you want to do. If you want a great programming language with vast ecosystem and decent number of job opportunities, Clojure is still the thing. If you wish to participate in the most mainstream thing, I believe the Python/Java/Javascript is the answer. But then you're competing with 30 million of other job seekers there. Perhaps Clojure can't rival the Cardashians or Lady Gagas of this world in the amount of news (for better or worse).

bsder 4y ago
Clojure has probably had its heyday, but it's quite far from dead. The main issue is that there are other JVM languages nowadays that don't suck--that wasn't the case back in 2009. So, if you wanted the Java ecosystem but didn't want Java, your choices were quite limited. You had Scala (just ... no) and Groovy (oh, hell, no) and ... Clojure. Since then, Java, itself, has gotten a lot better, and there have become a plethora of JVM languages since. In addition, a lot of languages now have "package managers" like lein. They have also adopted "default const-ness". So, a lot of the issue is that things that were unique to Clojure are no longer that unique in this generation of new languages. Finally, the JVM ecosystem doesn't have the same enterprise pull that it did 10 years ago ... enterprise installations back then only had the JVM, while now you can generally count on a version of Python also being installed. Computer language adoption is slow in spite of what everybody thinks. Pick a language that you can use as a tool for the future, and don't worry too much as long as it isn't actively un-popular. You'll have to learn a new computer language about once every 15 years anyway.
- yogthos 4y ago
  Thing is that Clojure is a very different language from Java in pretty much every way. People who use Clojure are typically drawn to it because it's a Lisp and facilitates interactive development. I highly doubt that it's popularity is significantly affected by languages like Kotlin that try to be a better Java. If you're looking for a Lisp that you can use in production then Clojure is your best bet. This is the selling point of Clojure, and why it's unlikely to be displaced by newer JVM languages from its niche.

mindaslab 4y ago

I don't think it's dead. I am learning it, getting a lot of help from community. It's the best programming language I have seen.

tramav 4y ago

Clojure is very much alive. A dead language looks very different (Ceylon comes to my mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932085)

thfuran 4y ago
It's a shame Ceylon died.

oweiler 4y ago

Kotlin + Arrow is what you are looking for.

masukomi 4y ago

> PS: Asking because I want to delve into a functional language but I cannot bring myself to do this seriously if it doesn't translate into market value. learn a functional language because you want to learn a functional language. Learn whatever one sparks your interest. It doesn't matter what one you learn because NONE of them have notable share in the job market. If you learn _any_ functional language you'll have a leg up on other applicants for _any_ functional language job because hardly anyone bothers to learn them. Also, there are so few jobs in functional programming that you're unlikely to get one anyway. So, again, just learn what you want to learn.

invalidOrTaken 4y ago

*procrastinates working @ his clojure job to browse hn*

xmlblog 4y ago

I mean... 1. https://clojure.org/news/news https://clojure.org/news/news 2. https://ask.clojure.org/ https://ask.clojure.org/ 3. https://groups.google.com/g/clojure https://groups.google.com/g/clojure 4. http://planet.clojure.in/ http://planet.clojure.in/ 5. https://twitter.com/i/communities/1494013093059432451 https://twitter.com/i/communities/1494013093059432451 ...make it seem as though reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

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yogthos 4y ago

Been using Clojure for over a decade now, and I see these articles at least once a year. The reality is that Clojure is used more than ever today, with more libraries, tools, and companies around it. It was a viable language for many years, and the situation only keeps improving in every way. Clojure simply doesn't have the hype around it because it's a mature and conservative language that's not chasing fads. This is a good thing because it's one of the most stable ecosystems I've had the pleasure to work with. If you're looking for a hip new language then Clojure is probably not for you, but if you're looking to actually get work done using one of the best languages around then look no further.

Jeaye 4y ago

Clojure is not dead. As a measure of community, the Slack workspace has around 25k members in it right now. Even more, Clojure lives on through its various dialects: ClojureScript (JS), Clojure CLR, Clojerl (Erlang), Fennel (Lua), jank (LLVM C++), Ferret (LLVM C++), Babashka, Squint, and so on. Definitely worth learning, as it will expand your mind; Rich Hickey's talks are some of the most influential I've ever seen.

joeevans1000 4y ago

C'mon. Just try a function. It's on me, no charge.

zmibes 4y ago

Plenty of anicdata here - so here my 2p: I started with Clojure about 5 years ago. Since then the community, tooling and job options have bloomed from my perspective. This could be an illusion caused by becoming gradually more immersed in it. Clojure will not die for now, for the same reason that it remains nieche - it's a lisp. Arguably the only viable full stack web dev lisp. And lispers gonna lisp. If that speaks to you on a philosophical/aesthetic level then go for it, you will be in good company. If you want to try to time the hype market then truly best of luck. However, I think choosing to invest in a language that works for you and your way of thinking will be a less fragile strategy. I'll keep Clojuring for a while at least, because it's a pleasure. Because it lets me reason where other languages would have me memorise. I find memorising syntax tedious. It's not a silver bullet of course - some things just make more sense for to do in a c/rust type procedural language.

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rippeltippel 4y ago

According to the the last StackOverflow Developer Survey [1], Clojure is the third most-loved language and the top-paid one. Having writing Clojure daily for nearly 4 years, my experience fully confirms that survey. I also noticed the apparent silence around Clojure and its community, which looks like a paradox to me [2]. The Clojure community is actually active and very supportive (the Clojurians channel on Slack incredibly helpful) but it's also very much low profile. Rich Hickey created Clojure as an independent developer and without extra funding. He's a great speaker, but likely didn't benefit from all the marketing channels available to more popular languages designed in more corporate enviroments, such as Rust and Go. Being a LISP dialect, Clojure is also quite niche (not the first language you'd learn at school/uni) and definitely not academic, but extremely pragmatical. Learning Clojure was quite mind bending at first, and I often wondered by my more experienced colleagues kept saying how expressive it is. I now see their point, and get paid quite well for having spent time learning it. [1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ [2] https://piero.github.io/stories/2022/06/23/the-clojure-paradox.html https://piero.github.io/stories/2022/06/23/the-clojure-parad...