HACKER Q&A
📣 shivekkhurana

Who Regrets Choosing Clojure?


The opinion about Clojure seems to be very polarizing. Some devs. refuse to write any other language, and some avoid it like plague.

The community also has a cult like appeal.

I've been writing Clojure for a long time, and don't consider changing sides. But I know a few people who moved on (to Haskell, OCaml etc).

Did you ever regret using Clojure?

[Ask HN inspired by : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23283675]

  👤 nanomonkey Accepted Answer ✓
I'm absolutely in love with Clojure.

That being said, it does suffer the Lisp curse, in that I now feel unable to function in previous languages that I was proficient in because I'm now allergic to boilerplate and the inability to create my own syntax when needed. Lots of Python jobs out there that I feel like I should be pursuing, yet I just can't seem to get excited anymore by non-lisp languages.

Wish there were more Clojure job opportunities out there.

👤 sendben2
I see a lot of engineers voicing their (insightful) opinions here. What about CTOs and engineering directors, HR, and headhunters who need to recruit? Do you find it difficult to recruit for Clojure?
👤 TurboHaskal
The only two companies that I know that offered on site Clojure jobs no longer accept new projects being written in it.

I stopped using Clojure after v1.2. I really love the language semantics: idiomatic Clojure is such a joy to read, but ultimately got tired of the lacklustre performance and the dogmatic, cult-like community.

I also no longer care about functional programming at this point in my career. Looking back, I think FP was not a way to write better code but an excuse for me to feel smug or superior to other programmers. I'm glad I grew over this.

👤 throw03172019
Clojure backend with ClojureScript frontend for the last 4 years. No regrets so far!
👤 rboyd
Good Clojure is pretty awesome. Bad Clojure sucks like any other bad code. The Clojure maximalism can get kind of goofy.
👤 CameronBarre
In 4 years I haven't felt the need to look elsewhere.
👤 a-saleh
I used it ~7 years ago, and loved it.

Our manager loved it much less, because the ramp-up to productivity was around a month for people not familiar with the language, so after our tech-lead left for another project, we spent six months rewriting the thing in python :-/

👤 giantg2
I started to learn it years ago. It is interesting.

The bad part is the lack of jobs. Without jobs, I decided to focus my attention on learning languages that are more common. I can't really say this was a better choice since my career is on a downward trend...

👤 polityagent
no regrets here (lead Dev at small company, 50ish employees) using for roughly 50% of the projects.

6 years ago we were fully Java, clojure allows us to mix the two without a business killing rewrite.

I've never had any problems training people on it.

👤 k0t0n0
There are no jobs in clojure