7 ms·

Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

362 points by adityaathalye 6mo ago

zerr 6mo ago
Interesting, how many ex-users of Clojure are in the comments. Everyone is praising it, but also everyone moved to something else?
- moomin 6mo ago
  It’s a real statistical outlier, nearly every language people have moved on from gets negative reviews. Me, it was fun but it wasn’t for me and eventually I concluded a number of the fundamental design decisions were wrong.
  - uxcolumbo 6mo ago
    Can elaborate which design decisions were wrong and why in your view?
    - moomin 6mo ago
      Here’s one: Mike Rettig wrote a great post about this in the early days, long since lost to time. Didn’t take that much note of it at the time but grew increasingly convinced over time: shared memory primitives are a bad idea. We would have been better off with an architecture that prioritised message passing. (Not that you can’t do message passing in Clojure, just that it isn’t privileged the way STM is.)
  - throwawaygod 6mo ago
    Can you expand on that a bit? What language do you use now?
    - moomin 6mo ago
      These days, it’s mostly C#. It’s got one of the most sophisticated list processing modules of any language I know of, you can fairly easily write heavily immutable code. It’s a bit niche because Microsoft but it’s nonetheless solid. My downsides compared to Clojure: no destructuring in parameter declaration. No immutable by default. But it turns out I prefer typed languages. Which isn’t a thing I’m going to argue about!
- wink 6mo ago
  Less ex-user, more like: never really managed to get to use it at work I guess (just like it is for me). It is still a niche language (compared to the big ones) after all.
mkw5053 6mo ago
In a previous life, I wrote Clojure every day and still look back fondly attending Clojure/Conj and sitting next to Rich Hickey and other Clojure greats at dinner. My first startup was all Clojure. AWS only had a dozen or two products and I think we must have been the first to compile Clojure to JS and run it on Lambda in production (the only runtime was Node.js 0.10 at the time). Anyway, I cannot wait to watch this
- xmonkee 6mo ago
  How do you feel about it now? Like holistically.
  - mkw5053 6mo ago
    I miss it. I’m now more removed and building software as a means to an end. I miss it just like I miss the program language and type theory group meetups in SF and working through problems in dependently types languages like Idris and being out of my depth.
    - wazHFsRy 6mo ago
      I felt exactly the same, but recently started building side projects again in Haskell and fell in love again. Really brought my passion for software development back. 2026 feels perfect for that, as AI can help with things where one was stuck, not the stuck in a good learning way, forever in the past. Now is the time!
  - LandR 6mo ago
    I love the clojure, but I think a big downside is not being able to use it at work and now work feels like I'm being forced to work with stone age tools in comparison. That gets quite depressing sometimes. Sometimes I think I was happier before I learned Clojure. Ignorance was bliss.
- throwawaygod 6mo ago
  What are you using now? how do you feel about clojure now?
ares623 6mo ago
[flagged]
- mkw5053 6mo ago
  Are you watching the same thing I am? What AI slop?
  - Jeaye 6mo ago
    I think they mean the video thumbnail, which may or may not be AI-generated.
    - FelipeCortez 6mo ago
      I don't think it is, considering they highlighted it in a post about human craft [1]. I read somewhere it was illustrated by felipemelo.net, but can't find the reference anymore [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3sf23 https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3...
      - pixelmonkey 6mo ago
        It'll be interesting to learn whether it was AI-generated. It certainly SEEMS like it is. It has a few "tells": - two belts and two Clojure logo belt buckles - same code repeated on the steps (odd artistic choice if made by the artist) - the seemingly out-of-place scarf, stylistically its color/pattern doesn't seem to fit Either way, it seems like an homage to this Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster: https://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/templeofdoom.jpg https://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/tem...
        pixelmonkey 6mo ago
        The BlueSky post has another interesting clue. The pencil sketch on the right. Seems possible a human artist drew the sketch, then had an AI model "colorize" it. And in so doing, maybe the AI model added the 3 genAI tells/artifacts I identified above.
agentifysh 6mo ago
is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged
- netbioserror 6mo ago
  Clojure might be the least esoteric language ever. Call a function, get a value.
  - agentifysh 6mo ago
    It definitely is more "mainstream" than others but I just don't see the same level of attention and enthusiasm around it anymore. I'm sure it is still being used in many places but like Elixir, hiring remains on the tough end.
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      Hiring good talent was always problematic. This has nothing to do with the quality, capacity, and robustness of the language or its relevance. Hiring people who would love to use Clojure but have no prior experience is not that difficult - it's just that every company wants an expert, but they don't want to offer expert salaries. In places where they do, the competition is nuts, on top of that, experienced Clojuristas typically get interviewed and scrutinized with the same level of rigor as architects. The industry should have optimized for hiring people interested in PLs like Clojure instead of LeetCode drillers. Clojure is rarely the first, second, or even third programming language people choose to learn. It demands a specific vision, dedication, and discipline that fundamentally transforms how people think about computation, data flow, distributed systems, and concurrency. The ROI from hiring an average developer experienced in Clojure has the potential to significantly exceed that of a typical hire. Even when there's zero Clojure in prod.
      - acheron 6mo ago
TacticalCoder 6mo ago
Incredible: I had not idea NuBank discovered Datomic first and that it's Datomic that led them to Clojure, 100 million+ customers, and eventually acquiring Cognitect. Good to see David Nolen (aka "swanodette") is in the documentary too. As a bonus here's a recent talk from David Nolen about Clojure/ClojureScript and using DOM morphing instead of React. If you don't want to watch it all, just take two minutes to watch from 23m15s to 25m15s. He compares a behemoth slurping all the browser's CPU and RAM resources versus a 13 Kb of JavaScript + Web components and DOM morphing: https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...
- mkw5053 6mo ago
  I don't know if it's still the case, but at old clojure conferences, or meetups, or places of employment, emacs was a prereq and assumed (and the most enjoyable)
  - adityaathalye 6mo ago
    I think it was more like Emacs got Clojure development niceties early, particularly tight REPL integration. Things have been different for well over five years --- about a third of Clojure's life. There are so many first-class options now. When teaching Clojure, I direct everybody to either VSCode + Calva, or Intellij + Cursive. LSP has really upped the game too. I rebuilt my Emacs development workflow around LSP for all the things. These days, I sometimes forget to fire up the REPL, because of all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo. Much gratitude to all the toolsmiths from all over the Clojure ecosystem. Special shout-out to LightTable for upping the game for everybody. I was very sad when the project went dormant.
    - lemming 6mo ago
      Things have been different for well over five years... In fact, I first presented Cursive at the conj 2014, and I'd been working on it in open beta for perhaps a year before that, so well over 10 years! ...all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo. ahem
ajdegol 6mo ago
didn't know datomic was free of licensing fees - I didn't use it back in the day because the cost was prohibitive... interesting
- dimitar 6mo ago
  It is! And also it has inspired a few other clojure datalog databases, so there is much more choice: * https://github.com/datalevin/datalevin https://github.com/datalevin/datalevin * https://github.com/replikativ/datahike https://github.com/replikativ/datahike * https://github.com/threatgrid/asami https://github.com/threatgrid/asami There is also xtdb, but it abandoned datalog and is going in another (albeit interesting direction) https://xtdb.com/ https://xtdb.com/ here is a comparison website, but it is somewhat out of date: https://clojurelog.github.io/ https://clojurelog.github.io/
malindasp 6mo ago
The double belt buckle is a pretty classic diffusion model artifact — it struggles with symmetrical accessories because it's essentially pattern-matching textures rather than understanding "this person is wearing one belt." Same reason you see six-fingered hands. The repeated code on the steps is actually the more interesting tell to me. An artist would vary that deliberately for visual interest. A model just tiles what it learned looks like "code." That said, the pencil sketch theory is compelling. Hybrid workflows where a human does the composition and an AI handles color/rendering are increasingly common, and they produce exactly this kind of uncanny result — strong underlying structure with strange surface artifacts. Whether it is or isn't AI, the irony of a documentary about a language whose community deeply values craft and intentionality potentially using generated art for the thumbnail is at least worth a raised eyebrow. Not outrage-worthy, just... a little incongruous.
- JB024066 6mo ago
  According to the documentary group it was hand drawn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashioned-but-we-still-believe-activity-7449864271229997056-BcXs?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAAK8SPwBa_My1oZwtXnZGh3kUL1BxY_fPcM https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashion...
- puredanger 6mo ago
  It was hand drawn by an artist. Indiana Jones (the obvious inspiration) wore two belts, one for his pants, one for his whip/holster. The code was provided by Rich.
christophilus 6mo ago
Excellent. The only thing I wish they had added was borkdude.
- iLemming 6mo ago
  Yes, sad there's no European presence (unless I missed someone). There's tons of Clojure over there. Metosin, Juxt, Borkent, Gaiwan (Arne), Flexiana, Peter Strömberg (Calva), Dustin Getz (hyperfiddle/electric), Christophe Grand (ClojureDart), Bojidar (CIDER), Renzo, and many, many more.
  - macmac 6mo ago
    I agree. Probably a cost issue as all interviews appear to be done in person.
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      They could've cut Zoom interviews in there - they are not expensive. The documentary creates a skewed image of Clojure being mainly in Americas, while in fact the big chunk of it is on the other side, where they have more conferences, (probably) more startups and (perhaps) people using it.
  - simongray 6mo ago
    I am pretty sure Dustin Getz is American.
    - iLemming 6mo ago
      Oops, my bad. Someone on hyperfiddle/electric core team is in Europe, I think, but now I'm not sure about that either.
  - wink 6mo ago
    Oh wow, that's indeed a bit weird.
pjmlp 6mo ago
Clojure is my favourite alternative language on the JVM, besides offering what Lisps have provided for decades, their philosophy of embracing the host platform, instead of all the talk that the next JVM will be rewriten in it like some others do, makes being around Clojure folks much more appealing.
- dgb23 6mo ago
  When I was younger this actually irked me a bit. I wasn't familiar with either, so it felt burdensome to me. The tooling also wasn't as good as it is now. However there's no doubt that this is one of the primary reasons why Clojure became relevant and widely used (for a niche language). Seamless integration (or even improved integration) is very useful. Another language that takes this approach is Zig. My intuition is that here as well, it's a unique selling point that will help with adoption and day to day usefulness.
boriskourt 6mo ago
I’ve been using Clojure since 2013, and can say that it has been an enormous positive force in my life. I’ve been a very unorthodox user, most of my artworks were built using Clojure in some way. But I’ve also worked in industry, and there I think Clojure helped me avoid burnout on more than one occasion. Especially when running a startup built half on it :) It’s also been a privilege to participate in the community. From Clojure west to the Conj, to the online discussions. Huge thanks to everyone that’s made this possible over the decades.
- ch4s3 6mo ago
  I'm not sure what you use ti for, but your website is beautiful and your work is really striking.
  - boriskourt 6mo ago
    Thank you! I’ve managed to shoehorn Clojure into everything from 3D model generation to VR networking servers for installations :D It makes so many things easier to reason about!
    - ch4s3 6mo ago
      Very cool. Anything open source/on github?
      - boriskourt 6mo ago
        I wish I had a chance to open source. So much of it was done in mad hacking sessions to glue things that were never supposed to work together. Or contain all the secret sauce for one work or another. Maybe the next one!
        ch4s3 6mo ago
        makes sense. I'll keep an eye on your site.
kevinten10 6mo ago
[flagged]
kevinten10 6mo ago
[flagged]
slifin 6mo ago
Looking back Clojure has been the best thing to happen to me in this industry I doubled my salary using it and changed industries to much more stable industries I've been to a lot of conferences and meet ups in my career but the feeling of joy and inclusivity at Heart of Clojure was unreal The community is still alive and well, my favourite passionate sub culture in the Clojure community at the moment is the Jank community, building a Clojure Dialect for low level work an incredible amount of work but they're doing it anyway The problem is businesses aren't really interested in stability integrity or joy when it comes to their languages they want to commodify their developers by forcing them to write the most popular and replaceable languages possible Then they're surprised when the quality of developers they're able to hire drops and the quality of their software drops it's all just a race to the bottom - emboldening companies to try and replace developers with AI and destroy their own companies in the process What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL, all they see is restrictions and unfamiliarity I don't know how these people got hired without a passion for the language - lots of them get promoted to run Clojure codebases
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering the first "real" reason I had for moving wholesale to Clojure was a shorter feedback loop. If that's not one of your goals when moving to Clojure, I'm not sure what you're up to really.
  - jgalt212 6mo ago
    Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.
jwr 6mo ago
I am so thankful for Clojure. It enabled me to run a solo-founder business for the last 10 years in a sustainable and maintainable way. It allows me to manage a large complex codebase (client+server) because of low incidental complexity and the fact that the server and the client share most of the business logic code. Also, thanks to the focus on stability and practical usage, I don't get my rug pulled out from under me every couple of years, like with so many other languages and environments. This is incredibly important and not immediately visible when "choosing a language to use", because the new shiny and the warm fuzzy are irresistible pulls. Clojure is not the new shiny and it's not the warm fuzzy, but it is your stable long-term companion for building complex software that is maintainable.
bachmeier 6mo ago
I've always enjoyed using Clojure. Unfortunately, most of the things I do require interacting with the C world, so it has never been a real option as my primary language.
- erichocean 6mo ago
  I also interact a ton with C and C++, but it's easy today to have Claude write a Project Panama wrapper and then put a nice Clojure veneer on top of the Java.
- perrygeo 6mo ago
  You might be interested in https://jank-lang.org/ https://jank-lang.org/ - still early days but full C/C++ interop is the plan.
- andersmurphy 6mo ago
  Coffi [1] built on java 22 (project panama) C FFI. Makes binding to C from Clojure a lot of fun. - [1] https://github.com/IGJoshua/coffi https://github.com/IGJoshua/coffi
- smartmic 6mo ago
  Have a look at Janet. It is not as powerful as Clojure but for smaller projects, prototyping, scripting etc., it is really enjoyable. https://janet-lang.org/ https://janet-lang.org/
Unsponsoredio 6mo ago
the "stable long-term companion" framing from jwr's comment is the part that sticks with me. every company I've worked with that chased the new shiny ended up spending more time on migrations than on the actual product. stability is boring to talk about but it's the thing that actually lets small teams survive long enough to win.
mark_l_watson 6mo ago
Clojure is a great language and ecosystem. I donated a little money to Rich's efforts in the early days (I loved his older Common Lisp - Java bridge so his Clojure project was immediately interesting) and I have been paid for a few years of Clojure development. I like maintaining the history in one place, nicely done. I don't use Clojure much anymore, but two hours ago I updated two chapters in my old Clojure book because the examples had 'gone stale' and that was fun.
- uxcolumbo 6mo ago
  What made you stop using Clojure or not so much anymore? No jobs in Clojure? Also, in your view, is Clojure better suited for ML / AI apps? And if so, what is stopping it from being more widely adopted. I read the interop with Python ML libraries is good?
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    > what is stopping it from being more widely adopted. The best tools usually need a level of skill or patience that most developers just don't have time for. And companies have to ship with the developers they actually have, not ideal ones. Lisp, formal methods, immutability, property-based testing - we agree on these. They just demand more than most people can give under a real deadline. A tool that shines in expert hands but falls flat for everyone else will lose to a tool that's just okay for everybody. Every time. That's basically what "worse is better" means. In our industry we tend to approach things with "scientific methods", without actually using scientific methodology. Nobody experiments developing a real business solution with multiple teams using completely different set of tools just to see which one proves to have better ROI. What we do instead is that we go to forums and emotionally "mansplain" our anecdotal, subjective feelings about a tool or technique. Anecdotes aren't completely worthless; they're low-quality evidence, which is different. A senior engineer saying "every time I've seen a team adopt microservices before they had the operational maturity, it ended badly" is transmitting pattern-recognition from, say, fifteen projects. That's not a randomized controlled trial, but it's also not nothing. But there's flood of "unfalsifiable anecdotes" - claims structured so that any counterexample gets explained away ("you weren't doing real TDD..."). Rich Hickey's talks are not science - they're argument from principles, with illustrative examples. But they're honest about being that. He doesn't pretend to have benchmarks proving immutability is better; he reasons about it from costs and trade-offs and lets you decide. That's a legitimate mode of technical discourse. Contrast with someone claiming "studies show" functional programming reduces defects by 40%, citing one paper with n=12 undergraduates. The second is worse, and it's worse specifically because it's pretending to be scientific while the first isn't. I think the solution is not to make the field more rigorous and more scientific and require solid peer-reviewing of every idea. It's making the field more honest about the kind of claims we make. Clojure remains hard sell to beginners because they haven't suffered enough yet. Experienced engineers get excited about immutable data because they've spent nights debugging race conditions. They appreciate simple functions-and-data because they've been lost in a tangled class hierarchy. The language solves problems they've actually had. Junior devs haven't hit those walls yet, so the solutions feel pointless. Why would you care about a painkiller if nothing hurts?

362 points by adityaathalye 6mo ago

zerr 6mo ago

Interesting, how many ex-users of Clojure are in the comments. Everyone is praising it, but also everyone moved to something else?

moomin 6mo ago
It’s a real statistical outlier, nearly every language people have moved on from gets negative reviews. Me, it was fun but it wasn’t for me and eventually I concluded a number of the fundamental design decisions were wrong.
- uxcolumbo 6mo ago
  Can elaborate which design decisions were wrong and why in your view?
  - moomin 6mo ago
    Here’s one: Mike Rettig wrote a great post about this in the early days, long since lost to time. Didn’t take that much note of it at the time but grew increasingly convinced over time: shared memory primitives are a bad idea. We would have been better off with an architecture that prioritised message passing. (Not that you can’t do message passing in Clojure, just that it isn’t privileged the way STM is.)
- throwawaygod 6mo ago
  Can you expand on that a bit? What language do you use now?
  - moomin 6mo ago
    These days, it’s mostly C#. It’s got one of the most sophisticated list processing modules of any language I know of, you can fairly easily write heavily immutable code. It’s a bit niche because Microsoft but it’s nonetheless solid. My downsides compared to Clojure: no destructuring in parameter declaration. No immutable by default. But it turns out I prefer typed languages. Which isn’t a thing I’m going to argue about!
wink 6mo ago
Less ex-user, more like: never really managed to get to use it at work I guess (just like it is for me). It is still a niche language (compared to the big ones) after all.

mkw5053 6mo ago

In a previous life, I wrote Clojure every day and still look back fondly attending Clojure/Conj and sitting next to Rich Hickey and other Clojure greats at dinner. My first startup was all Clojure. AWS only had a dozen or two products and I think we must have been the first to compile Clojure to JS and run it on Lambda in production (the only runtime was Node.js 0.10 at the time). Anyway, I cannot wait to watch this

xmonkee 6mo ago
How do you feel about it now? Like holistically.
- mkw5053 6mo ago
  I miss it. I’m now more removed and building software as a means to an end. I miss it just like I miss the program language and type theory group meetups in SF and working through problems in dependently types languages like Idris and being out of my depth.
  - wazHFsRy 6mo ago
    I felt exactly the same, but recently started building side projects again in Haskell and fell in love again. Really brought my passion for software development back. 2026 feels perfect for that, as AI can help with things where one was stuck, not the stuck in a good learning way, forever in the past. Now is the time!
- LandR 6mo ago
  I love the clojure, but I think a big downside is not being able to use it at work and now work feels like I'm being forced to work with stone age tools in comparison. That gets quite depressing sometimes. Sometimes I think I was happier before I learned Clojure. Ignorance was bliss.
throwawaygod 6mo ago
What are you using now? how do you feel about clojure now?

ares623 6mo ago

[flagged]

mkw5053 6mo ago
Are you watching the same thing I am? What AI slop?
- Jeaye 6mo ago
  I think they mean the video thumbnail, which may or may not be AI-generated.
  - FelipeCortez 6mo ago
    I don't think it is, considering they highlighted it in a post about human craft [1]. I read somewhere it was illustrated by felipemelo.net, but can't find the reference anymore [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3sf23 https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3...
    - pixelmonkey 6mo ago
      It'll be interesting to learn whether it was AI-generated. It certainly SEEMS like it is. It has a few "tells": - two belts and two Clojure logo belt buckles - same code repeated on the steps (odd artistic choice if made by the artist) - the seemingly out-of-place scarf, stylistically its color/pattern doesn't seem to fit Either way, it seems like an homage to this Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster: https://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/templeofdoom.jpg https://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/tem...
      - pixelmonkey 6mo ago
        The BlueSky post has another interesting clue. The pencil sketch on the right. Seems possible a human artist drew the sketch, then had an AI model "colorize" it. And in so doing, maybe the AI model added the 3 genAI tells/artifacts I identified above.

agentifysh 6mo ago

is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ? back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged

netbioserror 6mo ago
Clojure might be the least esoteric language ever. Call a function, get a value.
- agentifysh 6mo ago
  It definitely is more "mainstream" than others but I just don't see the same level of attention and enthusiasm around it anymore. I'm sure it is still being used in many places but like Elixir, hiring remains on the tough end.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    Hiring good talent was always problematic. This has nothing to do with the quality, capacity, and robustness of the language or its relevance. Hiring people who would love to use Clojure but have no prior experience is not that difficult - it's just that every company wants an expert, but they don't want to offer expert salaries. In places where they do, the competition is nuts, on top of that, experienced Clojuristas typically get interviewed and scrutinized with the same level of rigor as architects. The industry should have optimized for hiring people interested in PLs like Clojure instead of LeetCode drillers. Clojure is rarely the first, second, or even third programming language people choose to learn. It demands a specific vision, dedication, and discipline that fundamentally transforms how people think about computation, data flow, distributed systems, and concurrency. The ROI from hiring an average developer experienced in Clojure has the potential to significantly exceed that of a typical hire. Even when there's zero Clojure in prod.
    - acheron 6mo ago

TacticalCoder 6mo ago

Incredible: I had not idea NuBank discovered Datomic first and that it's Datomic that led them to Clojure, 100 million+ customers, and eventually acquiring Cognitect. Good to see David Nolen (aka "swanodette") is in the documentary too. As a bonus here's a recent talk from David Nolen about Clojure/ClojureScript and using DOM morphing instead of React. If you don't want to watch it all, just take two minutes to watch from 23m15s to 25m15s. He compares a behemoth slurping all the browser's CPU and RAM resources versus a 13 Kb of JavaScript + Web components and DOM morphing: https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...

mkw5053 6mo ago
I don't know if it's still the case, but at old clojure conferences, or meetups, or places of employment, emacs was a prereq and assumed (and the most enjoyable)
- adityaathalye 6mo ago
  I think it was more like Emacs got Clojure development niceties early, particularly tight REPL integration. Things have been different for well over five years --- about a third of Clojure's life. There are so many first-class options now. When teaching Clojure, I direct everybody to either VSCode + Calva, or Intellij + Cursive. LSP has really upped the game too. I rebuilt my Emacs development workflow around LSP for all the things. These days, I sometimes forget to fire up the REPL, because of all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo. Much gratitude to all the toolsmiths from all over the Clojure ecosystem. Special shout-out to LightTable for upping the game for everybody. I was very sad when the project went dormant.
  - lemming 6mo ago
    Things have been different for well over five years... In fact, I first presented Cursive at the conj 2014, and I'd been working on it in open beta for perhaps a year before that, so well over 10 years! ...all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo. ahem

ajdegol 6mo ago

didn't know datomic was free of licensing fees - I didn't use it back in the day because the cost was prohibitive... interesting

dimitar 6mo ago
It is! And also it has inspired a few other clojure datalog databases, so there is much more choice: * https://github.com/datalevin/datalevin https://github.com/datalevin/datalevin * https://github.com/replikativ/datahike https://github.com/replikativ/datahike * https://github.com/threatgrid/asami https://github.com/threatgrid/asami There is also xtdb, but it abandoned datalog and is going in another (albeit interesting direction) https://xtdb.com/ https://xtdb.com/ here is a comparison website, but it is somewhat out of date: https://clojurelog.github.io/ https://clojurelog.github.io/

malindasp 6mo ago

The double belt buckle is a pretty classic diffusion model artifact — it struggles with symmetrical accessories because it's essentially pattern-matching textures rather than understanding "this person is wearing one belt." Same reason you see six-fingered hands. The repeated code on the steps is actually the more interesting tell to me. An artist would vary that deliberately for visual interest. A model just tiles what it learned looks like "code." That said, the pencil sketch theory is compelling. Hybrid workflows where a human does the composition and an AI handles color/rendering are increasingly common, and they produce exactly this kind of uncanny result — strong underlying structure with strange surface artifacts. Whether it is or isn't AI, the irony of a documentary about a language whose community deeply values craft and intentionality potentially using generated art for the thumbnail is at least worth a raised eyebrow. Not outrage-worthy, just... a little incongruous.

JB024066 6mo ago
According to the documentary group it was hand drawn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashioned-but-we-still-believe-activity-7449864271229997056-BcXs?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAAK8SPwBa_My1oZwtXnZGh3kUL1BxY_fPcM https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashion...
puredanger 6mo ago
It was hand drawn by an artist. Indiana Jones (the obvious inspiration) wore two belts, one for his pants, one for his whip/holster. The code was provided by Rich.

christophilus 6mo ago

Excellent. The only thing I wish they had added was borkdude.

iLemming 6mo ago
Yes, sad there's no European presence (unless I missed someone). There's tons of Clojure over there. Metosin, Juxt, Borkent, Gaiwan (Arne), Flexiana, Peter Strömberg (Calva), Dustin Getz (hyperfiddle/electric), Christophe Grand (ClojureDart), Bojidar (CIDER), Renzo, and many, many more.
- macmac 6mo ago
  I agree. Probably a cost issue as all interviews appear to be done in person.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    They could've cut Zoom interviews in there - they are not expensive. The documentary creates a skewed image of Clojure being mainly in Americas, while in fact the big chunk of it is on the other side, where they have more conferences, (probably) more startups and (perhaps) people using it.
- simongray 6mo ago
  I am pretty sure Dustin Getz is American.
  - iLemming 6mo ago
    Oops, my bad. Someone on hyperfiddle/electric core team is in Europe, I think, but now I'm not sure about that either.
- wink 6mo ago
  Oh wow, that's indeed a bit weird.

pjmlp 6mo ago

Clojure is my favourite alternative language on the JVM, besides offering what Lisps have provided for decades, their philosophy of embracing the host platform, instead of all the talk that the next JVM will be rewriten in it like some others do, makes being around Clojure folks much more appealing.

dgb23 6mo ago
When I was younger this actually irked me a bit. I wasn't familiar with either, so it felt burdensome to me. The tooling also wasn't as good as it is now. However there's no doubt that this is one of the primary reasons why Clojure became relevant and widely used (for a niche language). Seamless integration (or even improved integration) is very useful. Another language that takes this approach is Zig. My intuition is that here as well, it's a unique selling point that will help with adoption and day to day usefulness.

boriskourt 6mo ago

I’ve been using Clojure since 2013, and can say that it has been an enormous positive force in my life. I’ve been a very unorthodox user, most of my artworks were built using Clojure in some way. But I’ve also worked in industry, and there I think Clojure helped me avoid burnout on more than one occasion. Especially when running a startup built half on it :) It’s also been a privilege to participate in the community. From Clojure west to the Conj, to the online discussions. Huge thanks to everyone that’s made this possible over the decades.

ch4s3 6mo ago
I'm not sure what you use ti for, but your website is beautiful and your work is really striking.
- boriskourt 6mo ago
  Thank you! I’ve managed to shoehorn Clojure into everything from 3D model generation to VR networking servers for installations :D It makes so many things easier to reason about!
  - ch4s3 6mo ago
    Very cool. Anything open source/on github?
    - boriskourt 6mo ago
      I wish I had a chance to open source. So much of it was done in mad hacking sessions to glue things that were never supposed to work together. Or contain all the secret sauce for one work or another. Maybe the next one!
      - ch4s3 6mo ago
        makes sense. I'll keep an eye on your site.

kevinten10 6mo ago

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kevinten10 6mo ago

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slifin 6mo ago

Looking back Clojure has been the best thing to happen to me in this industry I doubled my salary using it and changed industries to much more stable industries I've been to a lot of conferences and meet ups in my career but the feeling of joy and inclusivity at Heart of Clojure was unreal The community is still alive and well, my favourite passionate sub culture in the Clojure community at the moment is the Jank community, building a Clojure Dialect for low level work an incredible amount of work but they're doing it anyway The problem is businesses aren't really interested in stability integrity or joy when it comes to their languages they want to commodify their developers by forcing them to write the most popular and replaceable languages possible Then they're surprised when the quality of developers they're able to hire drops and the quality of their software drops it's all just a race to the bottom - emboldening companies to try and replace developers with AI and destroy their own companies in the process What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL, all they see is restrictions and unfamiliarity I don't know how these people got hired without a passion for the language - lots of them get promoted to run Clojure codebases

embedding-shape 6mo ago
> What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering the first "real" reason I had for moving wholesale to Clojure was a shorter feedback loop. If that's not one of your goals when moving to Clojure, I'm not sure what you're up to really.
- jgalt212 6mo ago
  Yes, but without a clean REPL you can't easily be sure that your var definitions are what you think they are.

jwr 6mo ago

I am so thankful for Clojure. It enabled me to run a solo-founder business for the last 10 years in a sustainable and maintainable way. It allows me to manage a large complex codebase (client+server) because of low incidental complexity and the fact that the server and the client share most of the business logic code. Also, thanks to the focus on stability and practical usage, I don't get my rug pulled out from under me every couple of years, like with so many other languages and environments. This is incredibly important and not immediately visible when "choosing a language to use", because the new shiny and the warm fuzzy are irresistible pulls. Clojure is not the new shiny and it's not the warm fuzzy, but it is your stable long-term companion for building complex software that is maintainable.

bachmeier 6mo ago

I've always enjoyed using Clojure. Unfortunately, most of the things I do require interacting with the C world, so it has never been a real option as my primary language.

erichocean 6mo ago
I also interact a ton with C and C++, but it's easy today to have Claude write a Project Panama wrapper and then put a nice Clojure veneer on top of the Java.
perrygeo 6mo ago
You might be interested in https://jank-lang.org/ https://jank-lang.org/ - still early days but full C/C++ interop is the plan.
andersmurphy 6mo ago
Coffi [1] built on java 22 (project panama) C FFI. Makes binding to C from Clojure a lot of fun. - [1] https://github.com/IGJoshua/coffi https://github.com/IGJoshua/coffi
smartmic 6mo ago
Have a look at Janet. It is not as powerful as Clojure but for smaller projects, prototyping, scripting etc., it is really enjoyable. https://janet-lang.org/ https://janet-lang.org/

Unsponsoredio 6mo ago

the "stable long-term companion" framing from jwr's comment is the part that sticks with me. every company I've worked with that chased the new shiny ended up spending more time on migrations than on the actual product. stability is boring to talk about but it's the thing that actually lets small teams survive long enough to win.

mark_l_watson 6mo ago

Clojure is a great language and ecosystem. I donated a little money to Rich's efforts in the early days (I loved his older Common Lisp - Java bridge so his Clojure project was immediately interesting) and I have been paid for a few years of Clojure development. I like maintaining the history in one place, nicely done. I don't use Clojure much anymore, but two hours ago I updated two chapters in my old Clojure book because the examples had 'gone stale' and that was fun.

uxcolumbo 6mo ago
What made you stop using Clojure or not so much anymore? No jobs in Clojure? Also, in your view, is Clojure better suited for ML / AI apps? And if so, what is stopping it from being more widely adopted. I read the interop with Python ML libraries is good?
- iLemming 6mo ago
  > what is stopping it from being more widely adopted. The best tools usually need a level of skill or patience that most developers just don't have time for. And companies have to ship with the developers they actually have, not ideal ones. Lisp, formal methods, immutability, property-based testing - we agree on these. They just demand more than most people can give under a real deadline. A tool that shines in expert hands but falls flat for everyone else will lose to a tool that's just okay for everybody. Every time. That's basically what "worse is better" means. In our industry we tend to approach things with "scientific methods", without actually using scientific methodology. Nobody experiments developing a real business solution with multiple teams using completely different set of tools just to see which one proves to have better ROI. What we do instead is that we go to forums and emotionally "mansplain" our anecdotal, subjective feelings about a tool or technique. Anecdotes aren't completely worthless; they're low-quality evidence, which is different. A senior engineer saying "every time I've seen a team adopt microservices before they had the operational maturity, it ended badly" is transmitting pattern-recognition from, say, fifteen projects. That's not a randomized controlled trial, but it's also not nothing. But there's flood of "unfalsifiable anecdotes" - claims structured so that any counterexample gets explained away ("you weren't doing real TDD..."). Rich Hickey's talks are not science - they're argument from principles, with illustrative examples. But they're honest about being that. He doesn't pretend to have benchmarks proving immutability is better; he reasons about it from costs and trade-offs and lets you decide. That's a legitimate mode of technical discourse. Contrast with someone claiming "studies show" functional programming reduces defects by 40%, citing one paper with n=12 undergraduates. The second is worse, and it's worse specifically because it's pretending to be scientific while the first isn't. I think the solution is not to make the field more rigorous and more scientific and require solid peer-reviewing of every idea. It's making the field more honest about the kind of claims we make. Clojure remains hard sell to beginners because they haven't suffered enough yet. Experienced engineers get excited about immutable data because they've spent nights debugging race conditions. They appreciate simple functions-and-data because they've been lost in a tangled class hierarchy. The language solves problems they've actually had. Junior devs haven't hit those walls yet, so the solutions feel pointless. Why would you care about a painkiller if nothing hurts?