I'm getting the impression that they've implemented a walk (like those found in clojure.walk) with types, builders and suppliers :thinking_face:

Cool talk, thanks for sharing! 💯

Yeah, tools analyzer walk, with a bit of tree seq

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GedrGWu16_I

@U3JH98J4R was thinking of the exact same video 🙂 He also uses the term Data Oriented in this article: https://www.infoq.com/articles/data-oriented-programming-java/

its not like we're uncovering a secret

Hang on, we didn't? 🤪

Here in this 🧵 please

It seems sufficient to say that many people are making a comfortable living writing Clojure. It's hard to pin down an exact number, just as it is for any language, but there are clearly many.

It's consistently at/near the top of most admired/highest paying on SO survey Also found this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33018037

A few recent Clojure success stories or products built using Clojure that people may know/use? Penpot? Roam Research

RPL's rama

Alternately you could point to the lengthy list of companies that use Clojure: https://clojure.org/community/companies

Also @U050CBXUZ is the best at this 😁

You could track over time the number of attendees/views at clojure conferences to have a quantifiable number

Electric and Rama are great candidate to demonstrate that clojure is not dead!

Electric and Rama are great tech innovations, but if you're outside of the Clojure community, it may not really prove that Clojure is alive. Like, if someone tells me about some highly sophisticated Haskell library, I'm not immediately convinced that its ecosystem is thriving.

Another quantifiable metric would be contributions to clojure projects over time

Griffin

https://www.juxt.pro/blog/clojure-in-griffin/

Another metric, don't know if it has historical record, is the number of github sponsors for OSS Clojure developers, Clojurists Together's quarterly budget, Juxt's blog and showcases

Yeah our engagement metrics should support there

Clojure is getting used at Docker, I just joined this team recently https://www.juxt.pro/blog/clojure-in-docker/

Also, don't forget companies that have been using Clojure for a while, not just Nubank, but Appsflyer, teams at Cisco, Walmart(?)

Frequency of appearances on various news aggregations, HN, reddit etc

as I recall Atlassian also use Clojure

Reason I like the sponsorship metric is it's highly actionable - it indicates developers for whom Clojure generates value on a regular enough basis they feel compelled to fund its infrastructure

Similarly for contributions, moreeso for those that can't afford to give Though that can easily be padded, so might need some denormalizing there

thanks, I have enough stuff for my Strange loop slide now about this topic I think :)

I would say that it's less about how many big companies use Clojure, which is a useful indicator of course, but rather about whether Clojure is sustainable. Are Clojure libraries being maintained in a sustainable fashion, are there enough people developing the language, creating documentation, maintaining tools, and so on. As long as there is an active community, then the language is very much alive and can go on indefinitely. I think this is very much the case that there is a critical mass of users around Clojure today to keep it going indefinitely.

Not really an answer to the question, but it might help coming up with a specific definition of "dead" or "not dead". If you're trying to change someone's mind, without a concrete metric that they agree with they will always be able to adjust they thinking so that the metric is different but the outcome is the original one. If you're writing an article, a specific definition will also help solidify the point in the readers' minds.

Just don't label it "Clojure's not dead" because that one went poorly for Punk

I won't do that, I'll just give a reason why dead languages are pretty great ;)

Who is Punk?

A musical genre

😄

haha ok

/ cultural movement

long live post-punk I guess

I like to think of the small languages more like proto mammals running around between the feet of big stompy dinosaurs. Eventually a mass extinction makes way for other, more resilient and flexible families of fauna to thrive

I think there's also the aspect of being hosted and piggy backing on the existing ecosystem, the talk David Nolen gave about that was pretty good. We don't have to build out a whole ecosystem ourselves, we're just building a nice API into it 🙂

And today clojure is the only language that can be hosted by so many platforms: • JVM • JS (node, RN, browser) • Bash • Dart (Flutter)

it's a pretty broad ecosystem we have access to

> Just don't label it "Clojure's not dead" because that one went poorly for Punk Doesn't count unless it's written like CLOJURES NOT DEAD 😉

also runs on .NET and Erlang VM technically :)

And Unity if we count Arcadia separately, but we don't want the listeners to look too closely into abandoned projects

mention #C05GUFQQLSK instead

for the original question, you comfortably say that Nubank has more than 1000 Clojure developers

I suppose Pitch, CodeScene and Exoscale also are worth mentioning

Datastax as well

https://www.michelin.es, https://www.orkli.com/en, https://www.guibe.com/en/gearbox-manufacturers, https://www.jma.es/en/, https://www.dualia.es/, http://akvo.org,.. are some of our customers.

@U014V99QYA1 Who is "our" here?

@U04V15CAJ http://biotz.io former http://magnet.coop. We did a market research to analyze our most profitable business strategy last year and I have to admit that we discarded Clojure body shopping for several reasons, mainly because it is not what we wanted to do, but also because Clojure’s market size is small. We continue and will continue betting on Clojure and Clojurescript to build solutions for them, but we no longer emphasize the programming languages we use.

Not sure what is your target audience, but I think a better message would be: Clojure is not DYING.

You could use reverse psychology and title your talk "CLOJURE IS DEAD!". I've got nothing to add here, but I still continue to love Clojure. So Clojure is alive and well for my demographic of people who use Clojure entirely for the joy of it (that's not much of a business case, I agree).

Might as well go for "clojure sucks" 😉

How I learned to stop worrying and love Clojure ;)

Indeed :)

My talk isn't about this topic, but I want to explain why I still invest most of my working time in Clojure and I believe in the ecosystem being in a good place, just one slide

@U04V15CAJ, we hired market analysts for this. I share an screenshot of companies that use Clojure.

In my talk at Conj I mentioned we (Nubank) have more than 1200 engs, which is still true

Datadog uses Clojure?

@UK0810AQ2 that's what the market research consultancy that I hired last year told me.

I am a serial entrepreneur and both of my projects are full-Clojure stacks, planning my third clojure project/business now. Might not be a significant data point, but it is something that enables me as an "individual/solo" developer to be as productive as a team of 6-10 in other languages.

I keep hearing of tiny companies using Clojure, and that seems to be be the under-the-radar story. Also the fact that even solo programmers can make a living by making things in the ecosystem, or by using the ecosystem. That suggests fair health at whatever size/scale the ecosystem is at. (e.g. cursive, partsbox, OSS contributors visible in clojurists together) Maybe the paradox of powerful tools is that they are not as visible in the market, because you can do more with less.

The big enterprise names of course, as others have mentioned... Apple, Walmart, Cisco, Boeing, "decacorns" like Gojek etc. etc. There's Clojure at NASA too: https://github.com/nasa/Common-Metadata-Repository

And since nobody mentioned the success stories page: https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

clojure is dad

"A language is truly established as mainstream when some random person on the Internet claims it's dead. If a language was dead, no one would be talking about it" - Practicalli

"It should've been dead but now you're asking about it and I have to second-guess myself."

IT'S ALIVE! ALIIIIIIVE!

System: You are an expert on programming languages and human psychology, particularly the psychology of hyperbolism and sensationalism. User: Is Clojure dead? Assistant: As an expert in programming languages and human psychology, especially hyperbolism, I understand why someone might pose such a question. It’s vivid, a little dramatic, and evokes a strong sense of loss. However, it tends to oversimplify what’s actually going on. The programming language Clojure is far from “dead.” It’s true that Clojure is not as popular as mainstream languages like Python, JavaScript, and Java, but it doesn’t mean that it has no users or it isn’t being developed further. Clojure is a niche language, preferred for certain types of tasks like data analytics, AI, or concurrent programming. It is widely known for its simplicity, resilience, and robustness, and this makes it appealing to a certain category of programmers. It’s important to recognize that the vitality of a programming language isn’t necessarily measured by its mainstream popularity, but rather by its active use, continuous development, and the strength and activity of its user community. Clojure ticks all these boxes.

ChatGPT has SPOKEN

Well, if ChatGPT says so, then it must be true! 😃

I asked it for quantifiable data. Many things have been mentioned already, but it adds that there ~25000 libraries in Clojars.

As of 2021 obviously.

Kind of a leading system prompt, though...

pretend you have to put a program on a flash drive in a time capsule, and when you open it in 10 years you still want to be able to run it and still have it do what it’s supposed to. it has more than zero dependencies. you can write it in python, js or typescript on node, or clojure on the jvm. which one will you pick? • to what degree does the popularity of the language impact your choice? • to what degree does the amount of tech sphere news cycle being spent on it impact your choice? how good is the popularity metric really for future proofing something? that’s what the goal would be to assess language trends and not use something that clearly works today, right? you will also notice, that the decrease in people talking about clojure on social media, except for the amplification of negative comments about leaving it or it being dead etc, all started happening in the ~2016+ish time range, the era of ubiquitous social media enshittification, dropping timelines for algorithmic curation, etc. that helped drive certain political outcomes in the US, etc. are the things that increasingly dominate our news cycles the things that people are happy with, and are silently working out ok without too much fuss? clojure is mature and not going anywhere. a ton of serious effort has been expended on making it a solid foundation to build on, and it continues to receive a good amount of use and community investment. it also interestingly seems to have had more international success and use in the past few years than US specific, which impacts aggregators focused on US, English lang only, etc. personally I’m too happy using it to spend my time reading github stars and SO question churn like tea leaves.

> Electric and Rama are great tech innovations, but if you're outside of the Clojure community, it may not really prove that Clojure is alive. > This is super true if you look into places like HackerNew's Who Is Hiring and search for Clojure you se a downwards trend, I think the last 2-3 months where only one result with Clojure, followed by 2 an 3 in the previous months. What I want to say with all of this is that maybe looking outside of our community this feeling can be true. Ps. I used https://hnhired.fly.dev to do the search, maybe I did something wrong :D and I'm talking some BS

@U04V15CAJ not sure it's useful for what you're doing but I did a post on Clojure adoption https://www.devcycle.co.uk/Clojure-Adoption/