“If you aren't working with Datomic, or in finance- this move is a stronger statement that maybe Clojure doesn't have the strongest future for you.”
I don’t follow. The company the python BDFL last worked for was a storage outfit with a valuation roughly equal to Nubank. The Rails BDFL is at a pretty small software shop in Chicago. Ruby BDFL was at a division of Salesforce last I checked.
Seems a bit reductive to say that Clojure creator being employed by a bank makes Clojure a worse choice outside finance.
a. ruby and especially python (and PHP for that matter) are top 15 languages with very wide adoption, following, name recognition, use cases. Great documentation, lots of books, conferences, blogs. Robust business and consulting ecosystem. etc. Lots of onramps and growth curves for individuals. And communities still growing steadily. Clojure is substantially younger (10 years vs 30 for py, 25 for php and ruby) but it is comparatively tiny and niche and arguably its rate of growth is lower
b. syntax is part of the story here. Clojure is a better language than kotlin, but kotlin is seeing explosive general purpose use case growth that Clojure can only dream about. Clojure syntax is niche.
c. there are a very large number of technologies, including languages, that have wide usage within finance and banking and zero use outside. No matter how neat k is, there is no market for tutorials, no community growth (well, maybe modulo data sci world). No one is ever going to use jbase rather than postgres. Many of these also have niche syntax.
d. I think the Nubank news on balance is terrific, but I don't think it helps Clojure's community growth story at all, which is a chicken/egg problem in the context of general purpose use outside of finance. Nubank committing to that outcome...seems doubtful to me, compared to Nubank wanting to have more control over what it considers to be its strategic differentiator.
This last could well be wrong, and what we'll get from Nubank-owned Cognitect is developer experience, onboarding, a completed Spec, a comprehensible REPL-based developer onboarding, error messages, documentation- all the UX things where Clojure's superior design ergonomics are undone by nits in the experience.
My understanding is that Nubank is concerned about these things for its internal people, that their hiring rate has forced them to solve for onboarding. We will see. The Clojure team itself likes the sharp tools for experts model. There would need to be a funded change in that emphasis for the acceptability of Clojure solutions in areas where it wasn't already known to grow.
I don’t follow. The company the python BDFL last worked for was a storage outfit with a valuation roughly equal to Nubank. The Rails BDFL is at a pretty small software shop in Chicago. Ruby BDFL was at a division of Salesforce last I checked.
Seems a bit reductive to say that Clojure creator being employed by a bank makes Clojure a worse choice outside finance.