Hacker News Reader

Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an expert in Clojure, I've played with it a little. I think it's one of the best designed languages I've ever seen - and I'm a static-type kind of guy :)

However, I have the feeling that its popularity has been decreasing over the past few years. I very rarely see job descriptions mentioning it. Have people observed the same thing?

View on HN

I have seen this mentioned once or twice before, and I'm scratching my head as to where this perception comes from. Maybe it's because of its position in the hype cycle?

My personal impression is the opposite.

Interesting. What do you think its position in "the hype cycle" currently is? No longer cutting-edge and therefor a little "boring"?

I also think I saw that it ranked pretty low on various "popular languages" studies. I would be very happy to find out that I am mistaken TBH.

It's achieved it's highest rankings ever on TIOBE this year. We have also seen record high numbers of Clojure language, ClojureScript language, and library artifact downloads this summer.

There's a substantial amount of Clojure jobs every month on the "HN who's hiring" thread.

Personally I would have loved Clojure to absolutely win, but being an elite language for senior devs isn't a bad situation either (I'm much enjoying my latest Clojure jobs and the peers I could find there).

This.

I really love Clojure, but these days I'm still mostly a Java/Kotlin guy. Haven't seen any Clojure job or Clojure being used in production yet, unfortunately.

Sadly, that is a common fate for Lisp(-like) languages nowadays. People are scared of unusual syntax.

I'm curious - how hard have you looked? There are lists with clojure success stories [0] [1] [2] and quite a few companies hiring clojure devs [0] [3] [4].

Anecdotally, there are 5 startups within a 1 mile radius of my office (in Charlottesville, VA) whose primary stack is clojure.

[0] https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14302762&__s=r8nvw64mp3...

[2] https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/wiki/Companies-Usin...

[3] https://www.indeed.com/q-Clojure-jobs.html

[4] http://hnhiring.me/ (search "Clojure", top right)

Sorry, should have mentioned that I'm not in US

We’re based in Bristol, UK and are exclusively Clojure on the backend and starting to use Datomic in production this year.

There are a few other clojure focussed companies in Bristol too.

If I look in LinkedIn I find more job offers for Clojure than golang. For some reasons other metrics do not apply, and I guess golang is more open source related than clojure which is more about building private services.

I don't think that characterization of use is true for either Go or Clojure.

I think the reference might be more in relation to OSS tooling such as docker, kubernetes, and a lot of the other stuff in the CNCF project catalogue which is often VC backed start-ups with OSS codebases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com