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).
Anyway, I cannot wait to watch this
studying them makes you smarter, which makes you better at using the practical stuff.
I miss it just like I miss the program language and type theory group meetups in SF and working through problems in dependently types languages like Idris and being out of my depth.
Good to see David Nolen (aka "swanodette") is in the documentary too.
As a bonus here's a recent talk from David Nolen about Clojure/ClojureScript and using DOM morphing instead of React.
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:
His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...
However, as someone that rather use Lispworks, Allegro, Racket, there is also Cursive on top of InteliJ.
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.
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.
LSP has really upped the game too. I rebuilt my Emacs development workflow around LSP for all the things.
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.
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.
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!
...all this fantastic "static analysis style" developer tooling by borkdude and eric dallo.
ahem
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
The industry should have optimized for hiring people interested in PLs like Clojure instead of LeetCode drillers. Clojure is rarely the first, second, or even third programming language people choose to learn. It demands a specific vision, dedication, and discipline that fundamentally transforms how people think about computation, data flow, distributed systems, and concurrency. The ROI from hiring an average developer experienced in Clojure has the potential to significantly exceed that of a typical hire. Even when there's zero Clojure in prod.
I've wrote about this in more detail here if you're interested https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html
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.
It's not because Rich doesn't want AI-generated pull-requests by people then taking credits that the Clojure community is anti-AI.
I use Claude Code CLI daily with Clojure, just not in a "write me five thousands lines of Clojure code I won't read" type of way.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3...
- two belts and two Clojure logo belt buckles
- same code repeated on the steps (odd artistic choice if made by the artist)
- the seemingly out-of-place scarf, stylistically its color/pattern doesn't seem to fit
Either way, it seems like an homage to this Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster:
https://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/tem...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emmalouisetracey_one-of-my-fa...
