(I think the HN title was edited since your comment; I think an earlier title highlighted the move from Clojure to Java.)
> It gives Clojure another usecase: a "production-ready prototype" language where the resulting "prototype" can last for eight years [...] until it gets rewritten to something else when all the hard questions are answered, and most experimentation/wandering is over.
That general story, first heard from Paul Graham, about projects starting with Lisp and being successful that way, before eventually being rewritten, works for me.
I've been hoping at least a couple college startups would be inspired by this to use Racket initially, but if they have, I haven't heard of it. (I speculate that the current FAANG feeder emphasis among CS students hasn't helped. Who has time to play with a Lisp, when the now-all-important whiteboard interviews won't use it.)
> Obviously, much more people will be able to consider contributing when it's in Java.
If you have a company, and you want to hire Lisp people (whether it's Clojure, CL, or Scheme/Racket), I think you can probably hire people, because Lisp people like getting paid to use Lisp.
If you're looking for unpaid/volunteer contributions to an open source project, there's all sorts of things that affect that, and it's not unusual to get little-to-no contributions.