Author mentions Clojure a few times as an example of shiny-thing. Ironically, it's one of the few languages that I can reliably do in the browser, on the backend (on real servers or say, Lambdas), and build native binaries for -- which addresses the later "many tools" problem better than a "boring" programming language like Ruby. Unless you don't care about frontend code I guess :-)

(Overall this talk is fine! I think the problem/technology set illustration is particularly useful. I run Latacora's Cloud practice and we own all production infrastructure and "no, more boring, boringer than that, keep going" is a good way to describe what that looks like. We deploy half a dozen projects with exactly the same zero config storage and in ECS Fargate because I'm not managing servers.)

But: - good luck finding a Clojure programmer if your current one quits. - good luck finding answers for your exotic bug/performance issue etc. Code is a liability, it's much more than language/VM/compiler features

I've ran multiple org that are largely or almost exclusively working in Clojure(Script) and trained over a dozen folks to be proficient Clojure programmers, and have not found that any of those to be a problem. For example: you mentioned debugging serious performance problems, but the JVM has some of the most advanced instrumentation on any platform.

This is actually a point subtly made in the talk: your real production problems are probably going to be a lot more subtle than "oh, it's Python's fault". It's "this table ends up getting VACUUMd a lot and a minor version change made the disk size required 3% bigger and that combined with natural growth and a logging bug suddenly caused a catastrophic failure meaning everything started swapping". Yes, one point is what tool you use (a shiny new graph database is likely to be fundamentally less operationally mature than Postgres) but more important is your collective expertise in your toolbox, because a production P0 incident is a bad time to learn what autovacuum_naptime is.

For example: those fancy performance debuggers probably don't work on your Lambda runtime. I don't see that as a Clojure problem, because you would've had the same thing if you wrote it in Java+Dropwizard or Flask+Python or Go (which are presumably in the boring category).

Is the flip side of that argument that you should only write things in PHP, because that is what the market has decided where programmers are the most fungible?

As a counterpoint, I have had a developer who had wrote production ClojureScript tell me it was the worst of all worlds - it doesn't abstract away issues of the DOM and yet you still have to debug what was happening in JS and translate it over to Clojure.

Another thing I noticed is that most developers who had to touch Clojure in my org all pretty much didn't like it at all.

Whilst Clojurescript may not solve all of your JS problems re-frame is certaily an advance over React + Redux. In fact David Nolen and Clojurescript have had a big influence on the development of React.js since Peter Hunt first introduced it.