I developed for fun in Clojure and ClojureScript probably for 3 years, it was tremendous fun and got me into Lisps. In many ways Clojure does still hit the sweet spots from a language design perspective for me.

I have revisited Clojure every now and then after and IMHO its in a weird state, too popular and successful to completely die, but also limited to reach wider adoption.

When revisiting old projects I have seen countless of Clojure dependencies having died in the meantime. I have replaced utility libraries with more recent utility libraries sometimes several times. Very annoying. Paradoxically the core API is really stable to a degree that bugs aren't fixed that are a behaviour userland code might rely on.

But its overall I think more of a symptom than a cause for frictions when developing Clojure. Community management is bad, even worse that RH nourishes this elitist aura around himself. Then the JVM integration is of course the blessing that led to Clojure's initial success but is at the same time limiting. The Java community by majority seems to gravitate towards Scala (weird scala version incompatibilities incoming, Scala DLL Hell) and Kotlin.

So overall Clojure is in a strange situation. For picking it up on-the-job its not the responsible choice probably for most situations I work in. For my private tinkering the JVM dependency feels just a little too heavyweight. I don't see that Clojure will hit an inflection point of adoption in any way in the future that would make it a viable candidate for me to use at work.

I really would hope that a Clojure-on-guile or Clojure-on-racket implementation becomes ready at some point that would make me want to switch from Scheme to Clojure for the toy projects at least.

Yes, the "best in class" libraries change every few years in Clojure's universe, but they always bring huge improvements that require completely new APIs.

For instance:

https://github.com/plumatic/schema -> https://github.com/metosin/malli

https://github.com/juxt/bidi -> https://github.com/metosin/reitit

https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel -> https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component -> https://github.com/weavejester/integrant

https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen -> https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn

> So overall Clojure is in a strange situation. For picking it up on-the-job its not the responsible choice probably for most situations I work in. For my private tinkering the JVM dependency feels just a little too heavyweight. I don't see that Clojure will hit an inflection point of adoption in any way in the future that would make it a viable candidate for me to use at work.

I think about programming languages as tools for different bottlenecks.

– Computational: Rust

– Networking: Go

– Business logic: Clojure / Python

And for many people Python has everything that Clojure is missing: a very low barrier to enter, and a very stable and well-documented ecosystem of frameworks and libraries.