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Comment by bshur | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that job postings for clojure are declining: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-clojure.html

And clojure isn't even mentioned in zdnet's most popular programming languages: http://www.zdnet.com/article/which-programming-languages-are...

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Wow, that is a shockingly steep dropoff! If you believe this chart, clojure will be extinct in another year. Could there be some other explanation than that clojure is really in a death spiral, like maybe Indeed has been growing faster in less developed markets or something?

If you believe that graph, then Java, Ruby and Shell are also on the way out. Nonsense.

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-java.html

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-ruby.html

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-shell.html

And yet Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, CapitalOne, Netflix, Oracle, Red Hat, Two Sigma and a bunch of banks use it.

Makes you wonder how indicative those lists are of anything.

I think that's the point. Although Clojure has been adopted by a small cluster of big names it tends to be ignored further down the food chain. Search Indeed.co.uk's API for title:Clojure in London and you'll find 8 jobs compared with 378 for Python. For the UK as a whole it's 19 Clojure to 669 Python.

Python has been around a lot longer than Clojure though, especially if you count years of it being used in production. Clojure has only started seeing wide use about 5 years ago.

The fact that it's already used successfully at large companies shows that it is an effective language. Most companies that try it end up sticking with it. So, I'm not really seeing a problem here to be honest.

Clojure was released 10 years ago with 1.0 officially announced 8 and 1/2 years ago. Clojure adoption has been stagnant for a few years now. 8 jobs in London after 10 years, IMHO, represents a serious adoption problem.

Python was released 26 years ago, and it certainly didn't have the ecosystem or the popularity it has today 16 years ago.

There are certainly more than 8 jobs in London for Clojure. JUXT https://juxt.pro/index.html alone hires more people than that. Maybe you're just looking in the wrong places.

I can’t speak for the others, but at least for Amazon, for every clojure programmer you find, you’ll find 1000 using Java. Sure it’s a big name using it, but it’s only a few teams on a few projects. That’s kind of the point of SOA, it allows the team to do what they want without huge top level decisions on what technologies to adopt or abandon.

That is not interesting. If you are making the point that the rate of Clojure job growth is declining, it could be a data point in support of that hypothesis.

What do you think Clojure's absence from zdnet's list indicates?

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