I think it's the other way around: Clojure gained more exposure than past Lisps because it runs on the JVM.
But it's still definitely niche and hardly used anywhere.
But it's still definitely niche and hardly used anywhere.
Groovy, Scala and Clojure were the early contenders that people were exploring and Clojure seems to have won a lot of mindshare.
The thing about Java isn't the language or the JVM it's the App Servers. Enterprises have invested heavily in the App Server infrastructure for deploying JVM based code from monitoring, training, etc.
Throwing all that away to use a non-JVM language is a REALLY hard sell. Those app servers are very well done.
Running on the JVM made using Clojure, Scala and Groovy possible in places where other languages wouldn't have been. In the early 2000s, it was Java and everything else.
The .NET ecosystem was awful at that time. The programming world was essentially, Java, Perl and PHP 4 in terms of enterprise usage. People said the words "Enterprise Java Beans" without a chuckle.
People were HUNGRY for better options.
Now you've got a solid C# ecosystem, Elixir, Go, a dominant Python ecosystem, significantly more polished PHP, K8's & Docker that make automating the infrastructure around all different languages consistent...it's just a different world.
I love Clojure and hope it gains more mindshare, but I don't think this is accurate. Scala currently enjoys quite a lot more industry use than Clojure does, for instance there are currently roughly 15x as many postings mentioning Scala as there are Clojure (source: Linkedin.ca).
https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018
https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2018
It's entirely possible that companies tend to hire for Scala via Linkedin a lot more than for Clojure.
It still kind of is in a lot of places. My country barely bothers to even teach anything else at a lot of schools, and enterprise is almost entirely dominated by the JVM.
You are exactly right. Having worked in Clojure and talked to a lot of other devs here and across Europe, most everyone got into Clojure or Scala because management and cultural complaints left them stuck with the JVM, and at least it beat building more EnterpriseWidgetFactoryGeneratorPatterns.
Oracle and Java are the new IBM, and just like IBM, no one's really happy with them but management yells if you use anything else.
This is true, but...
> Groovy, Scala and Clojure were the early contenders that people were exploring
... Jython and BeanShell were much earlier than those three.
Jython, JRuby, Rhino, and Clojure are JVM languages that are syntactic copies of existing non-JVM languages, and it seems JVM developers didn't want these. Clojure has won within that group.
But the other group is what developers really wanted, i.e. languages with a Java-like syntax but with extra features added. Beanshell came first with dynamic typing. Then Apache Groovy cloned Beanshell and added closures, and Beanshell never kept up. Scala had all that but also had inferred static typing, which Groovy later added but was too late to the game to have much impact. Kotlin then came and merged the best features of Scala and Groovy, and became successful on Android.
re: ABCL: this is really a great project. I don't use ABCL very often but when I need it I am grateful to the developers.
Protocols, records, structmaps, chunked seqs, transients, tagged literals, unchecked arithmetics, primitive arrays, custom data readers, transducers, validators and watch functions for vars and atoms, hierarchies, sorted maps and sets.
Clojurescript was much easier to make because it was written in Clojure, not Java. IMO if we ever see Clojure that is hosted on other runtimes it will be written in Clojure and probably still will have to depend on JVM.