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.
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).
It definitely is more "mainstream" than others but I just don't see the same level of attention and enthusiasm around it anymore. I'm sure it is still being used in many places but like Elixir, hiring remains on the tough end.
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.
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.
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:
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)
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.
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.
I don't think it is, considering they highlighted it in a post about human craft [1]. I read somewhere it was illustrated by felipemelo.net, but can't find the reference anymore
The BlueSky post has another interesting clue. The pencil sketch on the right. Seems possible a human artist drew the sketch, then had an AI model "colorize" it. And in so doing, maybe the AI model added the 3 genAI tells/artifacts I identified above.
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.
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.
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
didn't know datomic was free of licensing fees - I didn't use it back in the day because the cost was prohibitive... interesting
is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ?
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
Clojure might be the least esoteric language ever. Call a function, get a value.
It definitely is more "mainstream" than others but I just don't see the same level of attention and enthusiasm around it anymore. I'm sure it is still being used in many places but like Elixir, hiring remains on the tough end.
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.
I've wrote about this in more detail here if you're interested https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html
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.
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:
https://youtu.be/BeE00vGC36E
His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...
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)
AI slop Rich is gross considering his stance on it. I guess it's up to the producers but very tone deaf.
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.
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.
Are you watching the same thing I am? What AI slop?
I think they mean the video thumbnail, which may or may not be AI-generated.
I don't think it is, considering they highlighted it in a post about human craft [1]. I read somewhere it was illustrated by felipemelo.net, but can't find the reference anymore
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3...
It'll be interesting to learn whether it was AI-generated. It certainly SEEMS like it is. It has a few "tells":
- 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://printedoriginals.com/products/indiana-jones-and-the-...
The BlueSky post has another interesting clue. The pencil sketch on the right. Seems possible a human artist drew the sketch, then had an AI model "colorize" it. And in so doing, maybe the AI model added the 3 genAI tells/artifacts I identified above.
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.