Heart of Clojure

September 18 & 19, Leuven, Belgium.

Beyond the Hype: Obstacles on the Path to Clojure Adoption

Talk

To the mainstream public (devs and business folks), clojure is either seen as an arcane lisp, or as a hyped language. This perception of Clojure is further solidified by the fact that it’s hard to get started with Clojure.

Clojure definitely has a very passionate community and undeniable strengths, then what is holding it back?

By openly discussing these issues and collborating on solutions, we can propel Clojure beyond it’s current position as a powerful defacto business choice. There are many low hanging fruits and quick wins we can do to get the ball rolling.

  • Is Clojure growth declining? Is it even growing? Where are we heading?
  • Analyze reasons why Clojure hasn’t experienced explosive growth
  • Discuss challenges like perceived complexity, lack of familiar tooling, and smaller community compared to giants like Python.
  • Present data and surveys to support the points.

Propose actionable ideas to attract new users:

  • Beginner-friendly tutorials and resources.
  • More focus on Clojure for specific domains (web dev, data science).

  • Increased outreach through workshops and meetups – ClojureBridge etc.

  • Discuss the perception of Clojure as a difficult language.
  • Showcase success stories of beginners who transitioned to Clojure.

Missing pieces:

  • Discuss potential missing elements in the Clojure ecosystem
    • Do we need something like Rails / Django?
  • Limited industry adoption leading to fewer job opportunities.

FEAR: Identify common reasons why developers might hesitate to learn Clojure:

  • Fear of a steep learning curve.
  • Concerns about job market saturation.
  • Uncertainty about the language’s long-term viability.

I plan to address all of these concerns with data, community experiences, and future-oriented arguments. I’ll start conducting interviews and collect as much information as I can from community and outsiders.

I am open to changing the content of the talks if the premise seems exciting!

Speakers

  • Mitesh Shah

    Mitesh / @oxalorg has created Clojure screencasts, contributed to LambdaIsland open source repos and also recently volunteered at a ClojureBridge workshop!

    Mitesh works as a Senior full-stack Clojure[script] Engineer at Gaiwan!

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