I was talking about its ever expanding reach. It was more of an intertextual reference to the Andreessen Horowitz classic than an ideological statement about the popularity of Clojure, that is why I also added the (slowly).
That makes sense but it's not what comes across. The sentence immediately after says that "the language continues to grow". That's what I'm questioning.
That is my impression, especially 2019 seems to have been a turning point after 1-2 years of relative stagnation, but I get that you feel differently. That's why you switched to OCaml ;-)
I don't wanna nitpick too much (I realize that's all I'm doing). I just wanted to caution against stating what you perceive as a fact without any backing references.
How is it declining? Every single year we're adding 3-5 new conferences, last year alone - Ukraine, Russia, Brazil, India, Canada. New books being published. There are number of active podcasts (more than for any other FP lang). Latest JVM survey shown - Clojure has become more popular than Scala (largely due to Kotlin), but still surprisingly so. There's a Clojure related post on HN top, almost every week, sometimes multiple times a week.
Sure, it ain't Typescript or whatever, but it's definitely not declining.
Maybe it just means that there is a small and vocal community around Clojure - being on HN means that something is interesting for HN community, but it does not translate to wider adoption necessarily.
When Clojure was started it didn't have much competition in JVM languages space. There was Scala only. Right now we have also Kotlin, which seems to be hitting the sweet spot between being a better Java and being difficult to grasp (like Scala or Clojure). In addition Java alone is getting better, so it is harder and harder to eat its cake.
> Maybe it just means that there is a small and vocal community around Clojure
There's relatively small but vocal Emacs community. There are no books being published; almost no podcasts; it took forever to organize a conference, but they still couldn't find a venue, so it was a video-conference. Every few years there's a new "Emacs killer" but the ecosystem (after over 40 years) is very much alive and thriving.
Same thing can be said about Clojure. It's a very vibrant ecosystem and there's a lot happening in Clojuresphere, but of course, with almost every post about Clojure, there would be at least one person to claim - "Clojure is dying." Well, if that's true, then buckle-up folks. It's going to be a very long, steady ride.
