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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I’ll note this article could have been written ten years ago without changing a word. If you’ve already made your mind up about Clojure, there’s very little going on that’s going to move that needle.

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Time and staying power actually are actually prime movers of the needle. Ten years ago it was a 5 year old language, hadn't seen the 15 years of dev community evolution, ClojureScript was just out of the oven and relatively unproven, and unlike then Clojure now seems to clearly pull ahead in mindshare over Scala, etc.

Clojure ahead of Scala? In which universe? Go to any jobs site such as Indeed.com and you'll find Scala jobs outnumber Clojure by about 10 to 1.

A couple of unscientific measures of Clojure vs Scala:

- First couple of screenfuls worth of HN Algolia search stories by date covers 7 months of scala, vs 3 months of Cloure stories - score 1 for cloure

- on Lobsters, 2 pages of Clojure is 9 months, for Scala 3 years - score 1 for clojure

- in StackOverflow dev survey, Scala respondent count is ~50% higher than Clojure (~1800 vs ~1200) - though Clojure is "loved" significantly more. Score 1 for Scala.

I'll admit it seems more of a draw than I thought and you could reasonably weight the SO case a bit more than the first 2...

I spoke at a Clojure conf a bunch of years ago, I remember thinking “Wow this is a big room.” But afterwards I got talking to an event organiser about what they had to do for the Scala version of the same event…

I remember going to monthly "Hack The Tower" Clojure and Scala events at one of the big London financial institutions back in 2014. Both were hot languages but you could see by the presence of recruiters that employers were only interested in Scala.

malli, specter, and calva are all less than ten years old. Clojure has seen a lot of progress in tooling and libraries.

And now you get Clojure Babashka scripts too, which starts in milliseconds (thanks to Babashka being compiled using GraalVM).

So with Clojure you get ClojureScript and "shell" scripts too now!

I just recently started using Babashka and it is great, excellent productivity boost for text manipulation scripting tasks.

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