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Comment by lucidone | Hacker News Reader

I've tinkered with Clojure and find it a really refreshing paradigm to work in for building web services. However, I'm not sure I'd ever use it for something serious - it's a hard sell to management, and it's difficult to get developers on board to try something radically different compared to the imperative/OO programming models. Regardless, having played with it has changed my perception of how code ought to be structured and written. Thanks to Cognitect and the Clojure team!

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I'm in the middle of this transition and the biggest challenge is getting the OO way of thinking out of people's heads.

It's very challenging to stop thinking about mutating state in an object graph and adopt a functional programming model using immutable data-structures. Be prepared to face quite a bit resistant on that (as well as static vs dynamic typing, and the expressiveness of types vs. something like spec or schema)

I'm not too concerned about selling to management (well, I'm the CTO, so 1/3 of management is on board ;) since there are many success stories around Clojure and the list of well-known companies using it in some fashion is pretty large. When pushed, I just mention NuBank (over 4 million customers) which runs their business on Clojure.

I would dearly love to use Clojure more professionally but the problem in every country I've worked has always been the talent pool; I struggle to hire because Clojure devs are comparatively much harder to find. Clojure is a wonderful language and I was firmly on the hype-train back in 2011 or so but I'm not convinced it has much of a future outside its current niche. I would be very happy to be proven wrong though!

I had a similar epiphany to you in that coming from a Python background, Clojure radically changed how I thought about and approached problems. Rich Hickey's work is fantastic and I'm very happy to have spent time in that particular corner of the tech world.

Clojure is easy to teach. Why not just hire good devs and teach them Clojure? I think people overlook this too often.

The reason why Clojure is easy to teach on the job is that Clojure code base is small and code are very localized.

It's impossible to be productive in a large Java code base within a month even if you joined as a seasoned Java developer. But it is routine for a programmer who has not even heard of Clojure before to become productive in a production Clojure code base in two weeks. We do this all the time with our interns.

I work in Big Data at a Fortune 10 company. We don't even do what you suggest. There is very little appetite for niche languages that are difficult to just hire for. For example, we have a ton of Scala code due to a misguided belief that Spark must use Scala because it was written in Scala. We can't even go to the market and find people who have used Scala before. It's all Java developers, and many (most?) are not very good developers. So then I say we need to train organically if we want to have good Scala (and Java) people in the organization. Oh man! You would think I took away their birthdays! Train people? Dear god, no!

It's all optics and bullshit. Scala is pretty easy to pick up, as is any programming language. The problem is you have to spend the time. Time for most people, me included, is extremely limited.

In some parallel universe, I'm sure Clojure is the #1 JVM language. It's great and Rich taught me so much about functional programming and many other things. But at the end of the day, Clojure here in this universe didn't take off and I'm not sacrificing my career to beat that drum anymore. I tried hard, I really did: 2013 & 2014 were the years that were make or break. The wave didn't crest. When the people maintaining the plugins to Eclipse faltered, it broke down hard. IDEA never had solid support, either. Then, when the support tooling faltered, it was really hard to make the case to management, especially when other asshole developers were arguing for their pet tools. Type safety, meh! I don't need it, never have... So I write Java Streams and it pisses me off every single fucking day.

There is nothing more to say than "if you can find a job doing Clojure you are extremely fortunate."

There's no need to hire Clojure programmers, just hire good programmers, and get them to work on Clojure. Our experience is that new people can start producing something useful in two weeks at most. There's not really a lot to learn to become useful. Most of beginner's hurdles are on environment setup, coding habits, etc, these are not problems at all if they join a team .

Consider a distributed team. This is how we're setting up our dev team. It certainly helps with the talent pool problem.

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