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I think it’s noteworthy that whatever the benefits of clojure it didn’t outweigh the adoption issue.

It’s quite a mature language so I’m not sure that bodes we’ll for its prospects this late in the game.

Whatever the benefits of Clojure are, they were enough for Nathan Marz and first contributors to write Storm in it and succeed. Note that it's not an argument about impossibility of writing something like that in Java (see Spark, Flink, Heron, etc). But at that exact moment in time, a Clojure Storm was created and became useful to many people for years. There were many more Java programmers than Clojure programmers then and now, yet the Java coomunity didn't produce their own Storm first.

I think it speaks of something.

If you can have the foresight to know how your project will be used many years down the line, sure, make technical decisions based on that :-)

(Personally, I think the change is rather evidence of the primary drivers behind Storm development in 2019, and... that's not a good thing.)

A Java shop inherited a Clojure project and rewrote it in their preferred language. It's silly to read more than that into this.

I’d agree if it didn’t keep happening .

It doesn't. There are plenty of Clojure projects out there and nobody's rewriting them in other languages. There are also plenty of companies nowadays that have been using Clojure for years. The feedback from them is overwhelmingly positive.

Rewrites between languages keep happening in all kinds of permutations. I think pessimism or optimism from just headlines and announcements is more about what you read into it.

It reminds me of the “why we switched from Mongo to X” or “why we switched from Ruby to Y” trends some years ago.

I saw Clojure become popular long before it was ready for the limelight: it definitely wasn’t pragmatism driving it. It was a fetish for syntax and paradigm.

What if Clojure is a language that bodes well especially early in a project’s lifecycle?

I think it’s very difficult to motivate going out of your way to hire decent devs that know clojure and java only to throw away the clojure some time down the road.

Begs the question, why not just write it in Java? Then at least its more likely to be a refactor down the road rather than a rewrite.

I think clojure ought to be a production ready language that scales well. That’s what it was designed to be. However lisp seems to dichotomise devs into those that get it and those that don’t and thus alienates many would be team members.

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