I don't know what it is, but I've got the impression that Clojure is losing steam. I actually hope I'm wrong. But it seems after much interest in the hackerverse, it never really cought on widely. Any opinions? Or even better, proves to the contrary?
I'm curious as to what gives you this impression? 4 (5?) books, IRC channel is active as Scala's, mailing list near 5000 people, lots of Twitter activity, and there seems to be the same steady stream of newcomers as there has been for the past 3 years. Seems like a healthy new language to me!
I just went to a London Clojure User Group meetup on Monday. Stuart Halloway gave a talk on 'Radical Simplicity' which was well received. The event itself had 105 attendees and was free of charge. This was the first London Clojure User Group talk.
I wouldn't say it's losing steam. If anything, it's just getting started!
Clojure will never really gain a lot of steam. As PG has explained [1] lisp is an advantage only for very smart programers; the majority will never be able to take advantage of its multiplier effect on innovation.
In fact, your typical Blub programmer probably would lose long term productivity forcing himself to work in a lisp instead of a language well focused on his strengths. A Java or C-octothorpe sharply aimed at a coder only one or two standard deviations smarter than the average person will actually help him produce some kind of useful output.
But the community and popularity Clojure already has make it the most prominent lisp around for new projects and give it great long term prospects. This is the lisp that will be around in twenty years and probably the most popular lisp for most of that time.
I think one of the Problem with Lisp (and Haskell ...) is that people keep talking about how the are only for smart people and we should really get away from this.
Clojure is easier to learn then Java if your not allready set in Java ways and even if you are then you will have to learn a lot of the Clojure lessens in Java. Going more towards parallel und concurent systems immutebility has proven to be the better default and that what Java Books teach too. Once you get that in your head learning Clojure want look half as bad.
Not every Java team will just use Clojure or Scala but the trend in Industrie atm is to be open to all kinds of new stuff like FP, NoSQL, TDD, CI, XP ...
Its likely that Clojure will not get steam like Java or C but that alternativ Solution can be much better then sitting at your old tech-stack and that message will eventually even drop threw to mangers. Its a bottum up "revolution".
I think you're extrapolating wildly from what PG said. The first, viaweb half of his essay is about the state of affairs in a certain point of time. The second is about a tendency to underestimate the power of more powerful languages. Neither half said that lisp is beyond the majority. If anything the 'average' programmer has been getting smarter and savvier and more self-directed over time. This is why languages like Perl and Python and Ruby and Scala and now Clojure have had impact.
It has been stagnant for one year in Google Trends. It's progresson was eerily parallel with HN's in 2009 and the first half of 2010. At the time there were at least one Clojure story on the front page per day (fogus was a big perpetrator). Then people ran off of new things to show off and the mentions here became more rare. Roughly at that time, it stopped progressing in Google Trends.
Correlation ain't causation, but I wouldn't be surprised by a link here.
Are we looking at the same chart? The trend seems to be climbing to me.
fogus was a big perpetrator
I feel so dirty when you put it that way.
But if what you say is true then my recent lack of perpetration directly correlates with the trend of "Hacker News is declining" posts. Sure, correlation ain't causation, but from my perspective I was singlehandedly responsible for keeping HN interesting and edgey.
Hey, don't feel bad, I said that with the tongue in the cheek (sorry if it wasn't clear). I actually enjoyed the Clojure posts a lot and read most of them (as well as most of your contributions). Did you stop the Clojure-related submissions, or did people stop upvoting them?
In the chart, HN is rising at an accelerating rate, but Clojure has been stagnant or even slightly decreasing for about a year now.
You might find Strange Loop interesting. It's not a CL conference but rather a multi-technology conference on many leading edge technologies so you will find Clojure, Scala, Haskell, Erlang, Go, Ruby, Python, nosql, mobile, web, etc.
This year's keynotes are Rich Hickey, Gerald Sussman, Erik Meijer, and Allen Wirfs-Brock.
The conference is Sept 18-20th in St. Louis. Find out more here: http://thestrangeloop.com (full schedule to be posted soon)
