[hlship]

Clojure's slow, deliberate development pace confuses people. The core team takes backwards compatibility very seriously. What you see with each new Clojure release is generally improved performance, better Java interop, and a smattering of new features. This is doubly true for 1.12 which is doing quite a bit of invisible work to make interop considerably better.

So what you don't see is a constant flux of "innovation" followed by a community having to adapt to those innovations. People pull Clojure examples out of books that are 12 or more years old and they still run.

I think there's some very exciting things in the Clojure space, such as Clerk (https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk) for live notebooks, and Babashka (https://github.com/borkdude/babashka) for amazing (and amazingly fast) scripting.

[ReleaseCandidat]

I guess that the GP didn't talk about the language itself, but the users. For me it looks like Scala and Clojure had lost many of its users because of Kotlin and newer Java versions. Generally I see a decline in the usage of functional languages since their heyday in the 2010s. I guess that's because imperative languages either get "functional features" or are "functional enough" - new ones like Rust or Swift.

[ndr]

Clojure is more lindy than Scala.

If someone tells you their project is written in Scala, Golang, Groovy, Coffeescript it almost dates the project doesn't it? Not so much in Clojure.

It's niche but I can bet it's still going to be there 10 years from now, going at least as strongly as now.