Some languages judge popularity based on "freshness", others on "quality" and others on other values, like "usage in enterprise" and other variables. JavaScrip

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.