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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Clojure an extremely unpopular language (outside HN)? I mean, it's not even in the top 50 in TIOBE index.

TIOBE is garbage. It is primarily based on google search hits. Red Monk's ratings are based on github and stackoverflow (which Clojurists actually don't use much) and typically has Clojure around 25, which I think it is a defensible ranking. Best estimates of devs using Clojure are 20k-50k (based on multiple sources, some public, some private).

Wow, TIOBE has Object Pascal, Assembly, D, and PERL in the top 20. Also, MatLab over Objective-C. Meanwhile, Typescript is at 46, well below Julia, COBOL, Ada, and Rust (don't get me wrong, great language, but I'd be surprised if it was more widely adopted than Typescript).

Its method for ranking seems problematic.

It has been shown that TIOBE tends to not be very robust. If you change the metric from searches of "X programming" to "X language", you can can swing the results of many languages up or down by 20 spots. https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2019/09/16/tiobe-blog.html

> Isn't Clojure an extremely unpopular language

Are Haskell, Rust, F#, Elixir, OCaml, ReasonML, Elm, Purescript, Racket extremely unpopular?

Clojure today has more podcasts, books, conferences, jobs than any of these languages. But sure, it is a dying programming language. Just like Haskell has been "dying" for 30 years now and OCaml "died" multiple times in the past 24.

There are good reasons why they are still being used and why people get excited about them.

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