02 June 2022
Robert Randolph
With the introduction of Deref (the Clojure weekly news blog) almost 1 year ago, the growth of the Clojure community has become readily evident in the periods between State of Clojure Surveys. The State of Clojure Survey highlights the effect of that growth:
Clojure continues to strengthen its position as a language for established companies and young companies alike.
Clojure users support each other and work to strengthen the community
The Clojure ecosystem continues to increase the leverage of Clojure users.
To highlight the growth of Clojure, this year’s results summary will review this years results, and changes that have taken place in the Clojure ecosystem for the last 5 years
2021 extended the global challenges of the previous year, yet Clojure and its ecosystem moves ever forward. Nubank continues to increase its sponsorship of the Clojure community, and the number of people transitioning to using Clojure at work grows.
As the number of people using Clojure at work continues to grow, the enterprise and commercial domains of use also increase:
The size of organizations employing Clojure users is also increasing year by year:
The effect of Nubank’s scale of Clojure employment is in effect for the largest of org sizes, however organizations with between 101-1000 Clojure developers has grown since 2020.
While the opportunities for in-person contact have continued to be rare, Clojure users have taken to the internet to create online conferences and meetups:
The increase in online interactions has led Clojure users to spend more time helping others, contributing to tickets, documentation, participating on ask.clojure.org among other forms of interaction.
"Everyone I’ve noticed just seems so damn nice."
"Very nice and well behaved. Usually made of experienced developper with background / interest in software craftsmanship and developing robust and quality software"
"Everyone is ALWAYS nice to you. ALWAYS, no matter how dumb your question or mistake might seem."
"It’s very active (on Slack and Lambda Island discord), and people are always helpful."
"People are helpful, friendly. They respect each other. They love the language."
The stability of Clojure and the Java ecosystem continues to lead users to adopt newer versions of Clojure and the JVM. The latest version of Clojure (1.11) has a 41% adoption rate and Java 17+ shows a 49% adoption rate among Clojure users.
The Clojure CLI and deps.edn ecosystem continues to be extended by the community:
VS Code use with Calva has continued to grow with its integration of clojure-lsp and joyride. Editors which support LSP, or have an LSP package, are continuing to see improvements in static analysis due to improvements in clojure-lsp.
shadow-cljs continues to rise among CLJS users:
The programming language which users have come from has been relatively stable. Javascript and Python continue to leapfrog each other for the second spot. (see full results)
Clojure would not be what it is without the contributions of its community. Here’s a small selection of the shoutouts the community gave to the community.
“Daniel Slutsky. He reached out to me when I tried to get my foot in the Clojure door and is a wonderful person.”
“The Functional Programming with Clojure podcast. Those guys are awesome. Also Sean Corfield - I’ve learned so much from his discussions.”
“olical (conjure), jeaye (orchestra), metosin (malli), day8 (re-frame), technomancy (lein)“
“ I really appreciate Jacek Schae's courses for learning Reitit, Reagent, and Re-frame. If these had been available when I was first learning Clojure, I’m sure I would have stuck with it longer.”
“… Sam Aaron - work on Overtone + tutorials”
“All the people out there who write/vlog about their experience with Clojure. LVH, Tyler Hobbs, Alessandra Sierra, Rich Hickey.”
“… Daniel Compton, the NuBank team (go Cavalcanti), and the guys on Zulip doing all the machine learning stuff, Dragan Djuric”
“… All contributors to editor tooling (personally using Calva).”
“I really like the work of James Reeve and the way he maintains his libraries.”
“That dude who wrote magit and many others is a clojurian.”
“I appreciate borkdude (Michiel Borkent) for his prolific contribution to Clojure, Bozhidar Batsov (bbatsov) for CIDER and Martin Kavalar for his work on Clojure notebook just to name a few”
“The Clojure community inside my company.”
“David Chelimsky because always is trying to help to any nubanker”
“… Tony Kay for Fulcro - Wilker Lucio for Pathom - Thomas Heller for shadow-cljs”
“Alan Dipert, for his videos on hoplon.“
“Eric Normand for his podcast and talks”
“Kyle Kingsbury ("Aphyr")'s Clojure from the Ground Up is a resource I revisit and learn new, subtle things…”
“Chris Houser (Chouser) - He does a great job with leading internal learning at our company. “
“Daniel Higginbothan, for his wit and insight Joshua Suskalo, for his stewardship of the community Elena Machkasova, for introducing me to the language…”
The 15th anniversary of Clojure’s introduction to the world is October 17th this year. Clojure’s growth has been greater than the sum of the effort of the many who’ve contributed to the language and ecosystem. Here’s looking forward to another 15 years!