I do find that for about 5 years things seemed to be slowing down. Though I keep seeing it pop up, and new exciting projects seem to pop up from time to time.

Just today I saw an article about Dyna3, a relational programming language for AI and ML that was implemented on top of Clojure.

I miss the Strange Loop conference. I think a lot of Clojure buzz was generated there. Clojure West and a few others so a decent job, but the quality of the talks at Strange Loop were second to none. Not that it was a Clojure specific conference, but it had that focus on elegance that I don't see very often, and the organizer was a something like the Prince of Clojure, if I recall correctly.

I'm still enjoying the language, and all my projects still build and run just fine.

The major frustration I have with the platform is 3D graphics. That's a JVM issue overall though.

The small-medium sized community is actually fantastic for learning. The big names in the community are only a slack away, and everybody is so enthusiastic.

Things just mature and hype isn't as cool when you heard it 5 years ago.

1. https://xtdb.com/

2. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...

Not every project uses @FunctionalInterface, but I've been trying to add it to places [1] [2] [3], and now I'm able to use Clojure in a lot more places.

[1] https://github.com/LMAX-Exchange/disruptor/pull/492

[2] https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/19234

[3] https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/19366

https://babashka.org/

FWIW, Google Trends shows the hype peaking in 2016, but I doubt that reflects usage as much as buzz.

Instead, if you look at the annual State of Clojure survey results, which solicits opinions directly from the community, the number of responders peaked in 2020 at ~2500, and is down to ~1500 for the most recent 2024 survey.

- 2020 State of Clojure - https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-CDBF7CYT7/

- 2024 State of Clojure - https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-hht04mGydwZ6Nqr7N8vj...

Debugging and profiling is still somewhat Java based, and yeah that's can be irritating, but you get used to it.

Personally I do think that it's worth it; Clojure is a very pleasant language that has no business being as fast as it is, and core.async is an absolutely lovely concurrency framework if you can convert your logic into messaging, and you have Haskell-style transactional memory for stuff that can't be. So many problems become less irritating in Clojure.

Debug specifically is state-of-the-art. Look at YourKit, or any debugger included with common IDEs.

None of those tools has a shiny Visual 2025 aesthetic, but again, they work reliably and are going to work the same way a year from now.

Switched to SBCL for the faster star-up times. Now lisp-2 also feels more comfortable.

The transition of core.async specifically to VirtualThreads is still WIP as far as I understand, but with minimal tweaks, 90% of the benefits are already there, even with the current latest version.