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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

As far as jobs are concerned I'm not sure Clojure was ever alive. Search the Indeed.com API for title:Clojure and Location:London and you'll find 10 Clojure jobs. Extend that to Location:United Kingdom and you'll find the same 10 Clojure jobs, ie. nothing outside London. For other countries it's: France:0, Germany:7, Netherlands:3, Spain:1, Italy:0, Japan:0, China:0, United States:22, Canada:2 . Elixir seems to have suffered a similar fate. In fact the only functional language which has any real adoption is Scala but even here the numbers are patchy and well below the figures for Ruby which some say is in decline.

I think the best we're ever going to see is mainstream languages like Kotlin, Swift, Ruby and Python which mix functional features with OOP. In fact Scala really falls into this category so it seems OOP is here to stay.

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The whole point of lisp is competing with 500 programmers blub programmers with 5 lisp programmers.

I wouldn't measure Clojure's success with those kind of numbers. The number of applications running Clojure code would come close to a real metric.

The whole point of Java and Python is to provide VPs with massive departments to bloat their egos with head counts. Clojure or Lisp don't aim for such goals.

I find it odd to see Java and Python lumped together. The companies I've seen using those respective languages (by job listings) seem to be quite different. I'm a Python developer and I've only ever worked in small, fast moving teams (biggest team I've worked in had 4 developers).

You must not be in SF or NYC. Python and Ruby (and even Node, to an extent) have supplanted Java as the language of fungible mass-market headcount du jour.

I am in Germany, here they have hardly supplanted anything, specially when one actually cares about performance.

You're right, I'm in neither of those places. Where I'm at, there's C#/.NET or Java, and then there's everything else.

Anecdotally I've seen quite a few job postings recently mentioning Elixir. That it can be seen, along with Phoenix, as a more performant, easier to maintain successor to Ruby/Rails gives it some legs imo.

Beyond the superficial syntax similarities and the fact that Jose Valim was a major Rails contributor I really don't get this Elixir = Ruby++ thing. The languages are poles apart, based on opposing paradigms (FP vs OOP) and data structures (immutable maps/lists vs mutable objects).

It's more about Phoenix than Elixir alone. The language is approachable enough, although clearly different, and the frameworks are similar enough (router, controllers, templates, gem -> hex, etc.) that a rails dev can become productive in this environment relatively quickly. And, the effort to do so comes with a number of serious benefits.

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