Sad to hear about your experience.
> A lot of abandoned libraries. There's not a huge ecosystem around it compared to golang
I found it to be the opposite. In Clojure you have Clojurists Together: https://www.clojuriststogether.org which funds people to work on Open Source libraries. And more importantly there is Clojure Commons: https://github.com/clj-commons which takes popular Clojure libraries, that are no longer being supported and carries on looking after them.
When I found popular Go libraries that have been abandoned, I asked in the Go community, if there are such initiatives, especially seeing how Google is behind Go. When people didn't understand what I meant, I pointed them at the examples above, from Clojure. To which their response was "TIL, Clojure, never heard of it before! No, we don't have such initiatives in Go."
Maybe the initiatives from Clojure Commons & Clojurists Together need more visibility for the newcomers to Clojure?
I don't see an easy answer to this because having "done" be an available state is extremely attractive, and forcing extra work on the author would be the wrong thing to do.
The one example I can think of where that's emphatically not true is clojure-android, which was tightly coupled to the Android SDK and did not remain usable after the main developer moved on. The Android SDK does not share the aforementioned traits.
Find a random node package that was last changed 4 years ago and it might as well be toxic waste.
Find a clj lib with the same stats and it's probably going to work smoothly.
There are opportunity costs too, maybe you can say Spec is perfectly fine but you’d be forgiven for having mixed feelings with a massive codebase built on that in a world where many have moved to Malli or elsewhere.
But let’s also be honest, loads of promising Clojure libraries do get abandoned, not finished. ClojureQL was a brilliant, composable approach to writing SQL queries but never reached its potential and was left in a fairly buggy state. I’m probably four or five Clojure data access libraries on from that in my career now. Om was highly influential but good luck if you made an investment in that. Incanter could have been enormous but failed to reach critical mass and you’d be crazy to pick it up now. There’s ‘core’ stuff like core.logic that feels like a decade old unoptimised proof of concept that didn’t follow up any of the interesting paths it laid down. Heck, I’ve even got code that relies on libraries from Chris Zheng, who quit the scene after getting a deserved dressing down from Rich Hickey after complaining about the Clojure development process.
None of this is a moral failing on the Clojure community, and there’s no reason to be defensive about it. It’s a small ecosystem and it’s very hard to build critical mass. Clojure people often have magpie brains that pull them to work on new things. You’ve got to judge it for yourself.
"As of this writing (25-Sep-2014) I consider this library alive and well"
... "Update 2017-Oct-16: Still true. :)"
This library has been done-done for a decade now. I used it last week.