Hacker News Reader

Comment by 725686 | Hacker News Reader

Is Clojure still a thing? I sure would hope so, but I haven't seen much of Clojure activity in HN recently.

The language itself is still getting updates, a new major release was just dropped a month or two ago.

I do find that for about 5 years things seemed to be slowing down. Though I keep seeing it pop up, and new exciting projects seem to pop up from time to time.

Just today I saw an article about Dyna3, a relational programming language for AI and ML that was implemented on top of Clojure.

I miss the Strange Loop conference. I think a lot of Clojure buzz was generated there. Clojure West and a few others so a decent job, but the quality of the talks at Strange Loop were second to none. Not that it was a Clojure specific conference, but it had that focus on elegance that I don't see very often, and the organizer was a something like the Prince of Clojure, if I recall correctly.

I'm still enjoying the language, and all my projects still build and run just fine.

The major frustration I have with the platform is 3D graphics. That's a JVM issue overall though.

They even invited Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. hos talk is on YouTube and was awesome. His meta-notation is explained more expansively in a paper on his Oracle page.

I absolutely loved Hickey's talks even when I never used Clojure more than for a few simple examples.

I just saw a small 3D demo running at 120fps+ that some of the newer JVM vector APIs supposedly enable.

Link to demo @ timestamp: https://youtu.be/UVsevEdYSwI?t=653

My experience with 3D graphics is minimal, but I'm curious to know if these newer developments are significant in any way for 3D work.

To be fair, that is only so much that a Lisp can have as foundation beyond the core forms and macros, especially when it doesn't control the runtime.

Cursive, Calva and CIDER are already quite good.

After that, it is all about the ecosystem, what libraries people care to build.

This is for games? Did you try evaluating Jank that seems to be a LLVM based "native" variant?

Data visualization and simulation, but games are on the table too.

I'm eagerly awaiting Jank to stabilize.

As others have said, Clojure is still a thing. For anyone catching up with Clojure again after some time: check out Babashka! Think bash scripts, written in Clojure. It's delightful.

https://babashka.org/

Babashka is the best scripting environment out there. You just need that one executable and it runs flawlessly. The bundled libs are also very useful.

I still use it. They finally fixed my biggest complaint about it a year ago, which is that you couldn't use vanilla Clojure lambdas for the Java functional interface, and so you'd have to reify that interface and it was bulky and ugly. Now it works fine so long as the interfaces actually have the @FunctionalInterface attribute.

Not every project uses @FunctionalInterface, but I've been trying to add it to places [1] [2] [3], and now I'm able to use Clojure in a lot more places.

[1] https://github.com/LMAX-Exchange/disruptor/pull/492

[2] https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/19234

[3] https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/19366

I’d say clojure is very alive and happy. I’m a clojure newb and have been having a super fun time getting into it. Lots of very neat tools are in active development (babashka is the best thing that’s happened to my developer life in a while!!)

The small-medium sized community is actually fantastic for learning. The big names in the community are only a slack away, and everybody is so enthusiastic.

There's more clojure users than ever before and the team is active and afaik larger than ever before.

Things just mature and hype isn't as cool when you heard it 5 years ago.

> Things just mature and hype isn't as cool when you heard it 5 years ago.

which is why now is exactly the right time to start using clojure - after the hype died, but have active community and users.

Is Make still a thing? I sure would hope so, but I haven't seen much of Make activity in HN recently.

I don't know. Is it? I haven't touched one in 20 years.

Then you rely on it constantly without realising.

I sense Clojure attracts a bunch of people that prefers building stuff than talking about building stuff.

It's bad for marketing, but seems promising for the project longevity.

I thought Rich was being a bit pretentious when he compared to violin, but few people ask "are violins still a thing?"

Not surprised as Clojure is boring tech: slowly evolving with a big focus on stability (ie backwards compatibility).

Meanwhile: the core team has been extended the last couple of years. Also this summer NuBank (the company behind Clojure) announced the first 'Clojure Developer Advocate'. Their role will be to "focus on ways to support the existing Clojure community and grow the community through outreach and development."^1

[1]: https://building.nubank.com/clojure-developer-advocate-nuban...

EDIT: wording.

I was asking the same question today after investigating XTDB¹ (a Clojure centric bitemporal DB) and went looking for a batteries included WebAssembly framework like Blazor²

1. https://xtdb.com/

2. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...

I'm not sure, but maybe you can use Blazor with ClojureCLR. It's a feature complete Clojure for .net

:yes #{of course it is}

A lot of the Clojure editors I liked that were made specifically for Clojure seemed to have died down too. It's a shame, they were cool and unique.

Between Clojure and Racket, those have always been my two favorite Lisp / Scheme languages. I don't do a lot of Lisp but when I do its either in Clojure (thanks to Lein) or in Racket.

Cursive, Calva, and CIDER are all excellent and very well-supported options. What are you missing specifically?

Not the parent poster, but I suspect he's thinking of stuff like Lighttable, or Liquid. Editors that were written in Clojure, or specifically for Clojure, and had cool features that were not available elsewhere at the time. (I'm boring myself, and pretty much only ever used Emacs with Cider)

Correct, there's something I enjoy about editors designed for specific languages in mind, they feel like they're more refined. Like I use the really simple UI that Racket comes with Dr. Racket because it has some unique features, and it just works.

Very much still a thing. Even on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...

It is, but the community has been shrinking in recent years.

FWIW, Google Trends shows the hype peaking in 2016, but I doubt that reflects usage as much as buzz.

Instead, if you look at the annual State of Clojure survey results, which solicits opinions directly from the community, the number of responders peaked in 2020 at ~2500, and is down to ~1500 for the most recent 2024 survey.

- 2020 State of Clojure - https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-CDBF7CYT7/

- 2024 State of Clojure - https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-hht04mGydwZ6Nqr7N8vj...

A better source: 2024 survey analysis (and results): https://clojure.org/news/2024/12/02/state-of-clojure-2024

  - 2024 Highlights
  - Trends Over Time
  - 2024 New Users
  - Previous Results

Now... If we are pointing out isolated facts to make an argument, I would caution that survey popularity (sensitive to timing, duration, outreach etc.) is less telling---and less statistically significant---than isolated facts like this:

> Clojure versions

> Clojure 1.12.0 was released in September 2024 and the survey showed rapid uptake, with 58% already using it, and 65% developing or deploying with the prior versions 1.11, and a steep drop-off after that. Clojure’s focus on stability and avoiding breaking changes makes upgrades safe and easy.

> Trends (use at work, hobby, and study have all up-trended)

> https://clojure.org/news/2024/12/02/state-of-clojure-2024#tr...

> Because this survey has been running since 2010 (thanks to Chas Emerick originally!), we have lots of great longitudinal data and it’s interesting to compare some of the answers over time.

> Looking at the question of how Clojure developers use Clojure, we can see this has generally trended more towards using it at work. However, this year we saw an uptick of people using it for hobbies or in their studies:

Everything you quoted is based on percentages of the responders, not absolute numbers. Changing in-group proportions don't say anything about overall usage. E.g., if responder work usage goes up 10%, but 40% fewer people use Clojure, that's still a drop in absolute numbers.

Look for the number of responses, and you can see a decline each year after 2020.

---

It's possible that the survey may not have been advertised as well, but afaik, it's still posted the same way it always was: announcements on Clojurians, Clojureverse, reddit, etc. I haven't heard of any reason that survey numbers would have been artificially depressed for several years running.

Absolute survey responses are a signal, I don't deny that. But they aren't enough to make the generalisation you are making.

Fair, but I also mentioned Google Trends.

Or, I picked a random, reasonably popular library to check on Clojars: http-kit. The most recent stable release, 2.8.0, which came out last year, has only been downloaded ~600k times. 2.7.0 from 2023 was downloaded ~1.4m times. 2.6.0 from 2022 was dled ~2m times. Ditto for 2.5.3 from 2021.

I would have used Clojure itself, but I can't find maven dl statistics.

https://clojars.org/http-kit/versions/2.8.0 https://clojars.org/http-kit/versions/2.7.0 https://clojars.org/http-kit/versions/2.6.0 https://clojars.org/http-kit/versions/2.5.3

---

The thing is, I've been seeing little pieces of evidence all over that Clojure is waning, and not much that it's genuinely increasing in popularity. Any individual example doesn't weigh that much, true, but everything seems in the same direction.

If people want Clojure to grow, whether because they need job opportunities, a big employee pool, whatever, it starts with a clear assessment of where it's at.

Note that newer things are always downloaded less because they have been around less time (lots of people continue using old versions).

Maven stats are available to artifact deployers, but they are useless for estimating users or community size as downloads are largely from CI servers constantly downloading artifacts for testing. Download numbers are large and seesaw erratically. Unique IP counts are a little more stable but also inflated beyond relevance by CI.

I agree with your critiques, but I still don't think it negates the overall picture I see.

When I was a scientist, we were trained to look at the overall body of evidence when trying to assess a claim. Any individual study has flaws, but when we survey the literature as a whole, do we see many studies confirming a finding? Independent studies presumably don't share the same set of flaws (usually), and the more studies demonstrating something, the more likely it is to be true.

And I just haven't heard any counter-evidence. Are job postings increasing or decreasing? What's the change in MAU for Clojurians? Etc.

I looked for job/social media numbers, but it's hard to get those numbers. If you have better data, I'd love to see it.

All of those other things you listed, while important, are second and third-order side effects that are harder to control directly.

I need a tool that helps with problem-solving and product development, and works reliably and effectively across a wide range of use cases, from basic mobile apps to high-performance computing.

Clojure delivers that better than any other language or ecosystem that I know of in a uniform, well-designed package, all the way from the core internals of the language to deps.edn.

People are busy getting stuff done. Many people don't visit forums if they don't have issues, aren't looking for jobs, aren't offering jobs etc.

Yes, doing Clojure is more demanding initially than many other languages where you can basically template/ LLM your way to anything. With Clojure you might find it easier to do bigger and longer term projects that are rather easy to maintain even for a single person or a small team. That of course doesn't cause much buzz, because it's boring in the good sense.

The absolute number of survey respondents is not a good proxy for community size - the survey runs at different times of the year, for different lengths of time, and with different amounts of marketing. The only goal with the survey is to get a representative sample size. We have other sources of data, both public and private, that are better indicators and indicate the community size is likely growing at this time.

Hi Alex, if you have data that supports a positive Clojure growth narrative please publish it so that I and other consultants/influencers can share the good news in support of our shared mission. The perception of the decline of Clojure is becoming a board-level conversation at unicorn/ish size companies that are or were all-on on Clojure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com