I love to see that Clojure is used more and more at work and it does reflect in my own experience as well from when I was job searching recently. Seems that each time I do job searching there are more and more opportunities for Clojure.
I'm also very happy with the Clojure ecosystem, which is flourishing, with tons of great tools being made all the time (keep an eye on the #announcements and #releases channel on Slack if you're curious as well).
And everyone is approachable, friendly and encouraging, which I don't think is actually all that common to have based on my experience with other languages where the community tends to get toxic quickly, but it could also be because the Clojure community is small, further convincing me to spend the rest of my career working with niche technology.
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.
— George Carlin
On the topic of code editors, I see Emacs losing popularity, IntelliJ (Cursive) being pretty much the same with a slight uptick, VS Code (Calva) marching on upwards the quickest. Personally however I'm mostly using IntelliJ due to it being the most stable software for Clojure programming I have found, and second-best for me is Neovim + Conjure, actually. I do hope that one day VS Code + Calva would reach or beat the stability of IntelliJ because that would be a monumental achievement for open source software I think, but it still isn't there yet for me.
I've whined and moaned about the clj
and clojure
CLI tools before saying that I think the user-interface of those are unfriendly, what with their -X and -T weirdness I've not seen any modern CLI tools do, and which is why I much prefer to use lein
. I do however realize that there is no hiding from native CLI tools very soon, and so I must switch as well, but in terms of user friendlyness that switch would definitely be a downgrade for me.
But all in all another great year in the land of Clojure which I'm very happy about. Soon we'll get the StackOverflow Developer Survey 2022 results as well and perhaps I'll have more thoughts then.