Looking back Clojure has been the best thing to happen to me in this industry<p>I doubled my salary using it and changed industries to much more stable industries<p>I've been to a lot of conferences and meet ups in my career but the feeling of joy and inclusivity at Heart of Clojure was unreal<p>The community is still alive and well, my favourite passionate sub culture in the Clojure community at the moment is the Jank community, building a Clojure Dialect for low level work an incredible amount of work but they're doing it anyway<p>The problem is businesses aren't really interested in stability integrity or joy when it comes to their languages they want to commodify their developers by forcing them to write the most popular and replaceable languages possible<p>Then they're surprised when the quality of developers they're able to hire drops and the quality of their software drops it's all just a race to the bottom - emboldening companies to try and replace developers with AI and destroy their own companies in the process<p>What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL, all they see is restrictions and unfamiliarity I don't know how these people got hired without a passion for the language - lots of them get promoted to run Clojure codebases
> What surprised me the most in working with Clojure commercially is how many commercial developers did not get the ethos of the language or have watched the rich hickey talks or use the REPL<p>Yeah, this continues to stick out. The amount of people I've come across who do Clojure development and restart the application (really, the JVM process, kill it and launch it again, over and over!) is way too high, considering the first "real" reason I had for moving wholesale to Clojure was a shorter feedback loop. If that's not one of your goals when moving to Clojure, I'm not sure what you're up to really.
I am so thankful for Clojure. It enabled me to run a solo-founder business for the last 10 years in a sustainable and maintainable way. It allows me to manage a large complex codebase (client+server) because of low incidental complexity and the fact that the server and the client share most of the business logic code.<p>Also, thanks to the focus on stability and practical usage, I don't get my rug pulled out from under me every couple of years, like with so many other languages and environments. This is incredibly important and not immediately visible when "choosing a language to use", because the new shiny and the warm fuzzy are irresistible pulls. Clojure is not the new shiny and it's not the warm fuzzy, but it is your stable long-term companion for building complex software that is maintainable.
In a previous life, I wrote Clojure every day and still look back fondly attending Clojure/Conj and sitting next to Rich Hickey and other Clojure greats at dinner.<p>My first startup was all Clojure. AWS only had a dozen or two products and I think we must have been the first to compile Clojure to JS and run it on Lambda in production (the only runtime was Node.js 0.10 at the time).<p>Anyway, I cannot wait to watch this
Clojure is a great language and ecosystem. I donated a little money to Rich's efforts in the early days (I loved his older Common Lisp - Java bridge so his Clojure project was immediately interesting) and I have been paid for a few years of Clojure development.<p>I like maintaining the history in one place, nicely done.<p>I don't use Clojure much anymore, but two hours ago I updated two chapters in my old Clojure book because the examples had 'gone stale' and that was fun.
I’ve been using Clojure since 2013, and can say that it has been an enormous positive force in my life. I’ve been a very unorthodox user, most of my artworks were built using Clojure in some way. But I’ve also worked in industry, and there I think Clojure helped me avoid burnout on more than one occasion. Especially when running a startup built half on it :)<p>It’s also been a privilege to participate in the community. From Clojure west to the Conj, to the online discussions. Huge thanks to everyone that’s made this possible over the decades.
the "stable long-term companion" framing from jwr's comment is the part that sticks with me. every company I've worked with that chased the new shiny ended up spending more time on migrations than on the actual product.<p>stability is boring to talk about but it's the thing that actually lets small teams survive long enough to win.
Clojure is my favourite alternative language on the JVM, besides offering what Lisps have provided for decades, their philosophy of embracing the host platform, instead of all the talk that the next JVM will be rewriten in it like some others do, makes being around Clojure folks much more appealing.
When I was younger this actually irked me a bit. I wasn't familiar with either, so it felt burdensome to me. The tooling also wasn't as good as it is now.<p>However there's no doubt that this is one of the primary reasons why Clojure became relevant and widely used (for a niche language). Seamless integration (or even improved integration) is very useful.<p>Another language that takes this approach is Zig. My intuition is that here as well, it's a unique selling point that will help with adoption and day to day usefulness.
Excellent. The only thing I wish they had added was borkdude.
Yes, sad there's no European presence (unless I missed someone). There's tons of Clojure over there. Metosin, Juxt, Borkent, Gaiwan (Arne), Flexiana, Peter Strömberg (Calva), Dustin Getz (hyperfiddle/electric), Christophe Grand (ClojureDart), Bojidar (CIDER), Renzo, and many, many more.
didn't know datomic was free of licensing fees - I didn't use it back in the day because the cost was prohibitive... interesting
I've always enjoyed using Clojure. Unfortunately, most of the things I do require interacting with the C world, so it has never been a real option as my primary language.
You might be interested in <a href="https://jank-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://jank-lang.org/</a> - still early days but full C/C++ interop is the plan.
I also interact a ton with C and C++, but it's easy today to have Claude write a Project Panama wrapper and then put a nice Clojure veneer on top of the Java.
Incredible: I had not idea NuBank discovered Datomic first and that it's Datomic that led them to Clojure, 100 million+ customers, and eventually acquiring Cognitect.<p>Good to see David Nolen (aka "swanodette") is in the documentary too.<p>As a bonus here's a recent talk from David Nolen about Clojure/ClojureScript and using DOM morphing instead of React.<p>If you don't want to watch it all, just take two minutes to watch from 23m15s to 25m15s. He compares a behemoth slurping all the browser's CPU and RAM resources versus a 13 Kb of JavaScript + Web components and DOM morphing:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E</a><p>His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...
Datomic was the reason I switched [^1] to Clojure as my primary language in 2014. It was a gamble, but it paid off in the end.<p>I maintain that Clojure is the best AI-first language due to the lightning-fast iteration via the nREPL and Clojure's token efficiency.<p>[^1]: <a href="https://petrustheron.com/posts/why-clojure.html" rel="nofollow">https://petrustheron.com/posts/why-clojure.html</a>
Emacs has always had a tight link with Lisp communities, due to its history, including ties to Lisp Machines, so naturally many use it.<p>However, as someone that rather use Lispworks, Allegro, Racket, there is also Cursive on top of InteliJ.<p>However note that XEmacs was my IDE replacement during my first UNIX decade, due to lack of proper alternatives, so I do know about what Emacs and its derivatives are capable of, no need for yes but replies.
I don't know if it's still the case, but at old clojure conferences, or meetups, or places of employment, emacs was a prereq and assumed (and the most enjoyable)
I think it was more like Emacs got Clojure development niceties early, particularly tight REPL integration.<p>Things have been different for well over five years --- about a third of Clojure's life. There are so many first-class options now. When teaching Clojure, I direct everybody to either VSCode + Calva, or Intellij + Cursive.<p>LSP has really upped the game too. I rebuilt my Emacs development workflow around LSP for all the things.<p>These days, I sometimes forget to fire up the REPL, because of all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo.<p>Much gratitude to all the toolsmiths from all over the Clojure ecosystem. Special shout-out to LightTable for upping the game for everybody. I was very sad when the project went dormant.
<i>Things have been different for well over five years...</i><p>In fact, I first presented Cursive at the conj 2014, and I'd been working on it in open beta for perhaps a year before that, so well over 10 years!<p><i>...all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo.</i><p><i>ahem</i>
Cursive has been way ahead of the curve, yes. Sorry Colin, I'm both emacs-addled and fuzzy with timelines :D<p>So think of it more like "static analysis stuff for the <i>rest of us</i>" :D
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is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ?<p>back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged
I work on a large Clojure codebase with AI, and I'm getting <i>excellent</i> results. Likely factors are code density, the resulting token density, and a lot of well-architected code that the AI can follow — I'm not sure exactly, but the results are <i>really</i> good.
Yeah I see this at work - people are sceptical that AI + Clojure even works<p>but in my experience its amazing the overall quality of Clojure code in the wild tends to be higher than your typical language so AI's training on Clojure tends to be on modern and high quality code and the language is very token efficient, you can also tell AI to interact with the REPL to avoid restarts<p>The only downside I've seen reported is mis-matched parens but for me models have been strong enough to balance parens for about a year at least it's not something I actively work-around even though there are work-arounds like brepl and others
Clojure had lousy error messages, agents deal with this well.
Clojure is capable of producing some of the most dense code I’ve ever seen, so manual code reviews really start to feel like a bottleneck unless your goal is to level up.
> Clojure is capable of producing some of the most dense code I’ve ever seen, so manual code reviews really start to feel like<p>For me it's the opposite, the dense code is easier to review, because the proposed changes are almost always smaller and more informative. Contrast a change in a typical TypeScript project where changes propagate across tens of files, that you need to jump in-between just to understand the context. In the time it takes me to ramp up understanding what the change is, I've already completed the review of a change in a Clojure program.
Couldn't agree more. And I actually kind of like Typescript, but man, typical Typescript projects are so verbose and sprawling, it's crazy.
I would say dense code tends to help code reviews. It just is a bit unintuitive to spend minutes looking at a page of code when you are used to take a few seconds in more verbose languages.<p>I find it also easier to just grab the code and interactively play with it compared to do that with 40 pages of code.
I find it actually the best substrate to write AI tooling. All my custom MCPs are written in Clojure (bb). You hook up the agent to the REPL and let it go wild - it builds something nice. Also, Clojure is one of the most token efficient PLs.
Personally this is a hidden trick I use.<p>Ask AI to build something. By default it will use python. Sometimes js or typescript.<p>Ask then to do the same thing in Clojure. The result is generally an order of magnitude better. Shorter, easier to read for both humans and llm. Easier to adapt to changes.
Not to mention that changes are easier to review, because there is less of them. Same semantic diff for JavaScript and Clojure looks vastly different, and I'll favor to review Clojure changes any day of the week.
One of the main problems I have with the models coding is the feedback loop is way down the chain from generation, it's out at the commit boundary for python when your hooks are running, maybe at the point where the model wants to push a PR. The REPL lets that happen during generation, and the other safety measures help immensely. Immutable data, STM, all of the features in Clojure that gave devs super powers now do the same for a model.
This is like asking if violins are still relevant because we have cars now.
Clojure might be the least esoteric language ever. Call a function, get a value.
I would say with the nREPL feature and letting the AI Agent jack in, Clojure may actually be the most well positioned language for this use case.
Clojure is more relevant than ever in post agentic coding because of immutability and the REPL. The two big problems with agentic coding is context growing in unbounded fashion, and agents being able to get quick feedback on what they're doing. Mainstream languages fail on both accounts. I've found Clojure has been a great fit for keeping agents on track.<p>I've wrote about this in more detail here if you're interested <a href="https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html" rel="nofollow">https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html</a>
The double belt buckle is a pretty classic diffusion model artifact — it struggles with symmetrical accessories because it's essentially pattern-matching textures rather than understanding "this person is wearing one belt." Same reason you see six-fingered hands.<p>The repeated code on the steps is actually the more interesting tell to me. An artist would vary that deliberately for visual interest. A model just tiles what it learned looks like "code."<p>That said, the pencil sketch theory is compelling. Hybrid workflows where a human does the composition and an AI handles color/rendering are increasingly common, and they produce exactly this kind of uncanny result — strong underlying structure with strange surface artifacts.<p>Whether it is or isn't AI, the irony of a documentary about a language whose community deeply values craft and intentionality potentially using generated art for the thumbnail is at least worth a raised eyebrow. Not outrage-worthy, just... a little incongruous.
It was hand drawn by an artist. Indiana Jones (the obvious inspiration) wore two belts, one for his pants, one for his whip/holster. The code was provided by Rich.
According to the documentary group it was hand drawn:<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashioned-but-we-still-believe-activity-7449864271229997056-BcXs?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAAK8SPwBa_My1oZwtXnZGh3kUL1BxY_fPcM" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cult-repo_call-us-old-fashion...</a>
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You know there's a saying in Russian, that roughly translates to: "an expert surgeon is capable of helping a bad dancer", which is on itself is a reference to another idiom: "a bad dancer always blames his own balls".<p>That's quickly becoming befitting for cases like this - so often people rush to blame AI without even trying to use their own reasoning. I don't know what to say, hope you find a good surgeon, because it is obvious - you're shit of a dancer.
The very official Clojure page in TFA links to clojure-mcp (written by the person who created figwheel: a famous ClojureScript library in the Clojure ecosystem) and other AI resources related to Clojure.<p>It's not because Rich doesn't want AI-generated pull-requests by people then taking credits that the Clojure community is anti-AI.<p>I use Claude Code CLI daily with Clojure, just not in a <i>"write me five thousands lines of Clojure code I won't read"</i> type of way.
Are you watching the same thing I am? What AI slop?
As you demonstrated, AI is not needed to write slop, just because AI is involved doesn't make it slop. We are still very much in the control even if it is generation.