Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Documentary and community reaction

  • Many express strong nostalgia and gratitude for Clojure and its conferences.
  • Some wish the documentary had included more geographic diversity and prominent European ecosystem contributors.
  • The Indiana Jones–style poster sparked debate over whether it was AI-generated; later comments report the producers saying it was hand-drawn, with code supplied by Rich Hickey.

Language appeal and personal impact

  • Multiple comments describe Clojure as life- and career-changing: enabling solo-founder businesses, salary jumps, industry changes, and avoiding burnout.
  • Users emphasize joy, inclusivity at events, and a sense of craft.
  • Several ex-heavy users now work in other stacks (often for job-market or domain reasons) but still speak of Clojure very fondly.

Relevance in the AI / “agentic coding” era

  • Several argue Clojure is more relevant than ever for AI tooling:
    • Immutability and simple data structures make reasoning easier for agents.
    • The REPL provides a tight feedback loop during code generation.
    • High code density and token efficiency are seen as advantages for LLMs.
  • Some report excellent results using AI on large Clojure codebases, with good code quality in the ecosystem cited as a factor.

Tooling, workflow, and editor choices

  • REPL-driven development is viewed as a core superpower; some are surprised how many commercial Clojure devs still restart the JVM instead of evaluating in-place.
  • There’s discussion of REPL “staleness” problems and patterns for periodically restarting or clearing namespaces.
  • Emacs remains culturally linked, but modern options (VS Code, IntelliJ, LSP-based tooling, babashka, etc.) are emphasized as mature and diverse.

Databases and Datomic

  • Datomic’s now-free licensing and its role in attracting companies (e.g., a large fintech) to Clojure are highlighted.
  • Related Datalog-style databases (Datalevin, Datahike, Asami, XTDB) are mentioned as options, though comparison info is noted as somewhat outdated.

Adoption, hiring, and “worse is better”

  • Hiring experienced Clojure developers is described as tough; companies often demand experts but do not offer matching compensation.
  • Some argue industry optimizes for mainstream, “good enough” tools and easily replaceable developers, not for expert-oriented tools like Clojure.
  • Clojure is portrayed as demanding more vision and discipline, so it’s a hard sell to beginners and risk-averse leadership, despite high potential ROI.

Interop, low-level work, and alternatives

  • For heavy C/C++ interop, commenters point to JVM Project Panama, new Clojure FFI libraries, or Clojure-like languages targeting C/C++ directly.
  • Alternatives like Elixir, F#, Gleam, Janet, and others are mentioned, but several argue no single language fully matches Clojure’s combination of hosted runtime, REPL, immutability, and Lisp-style macros.

Critiques and ex-users

  • Some note many ex-Clojure users in the thread, which is unusual given the overwhelmingly positive tone.
  • One commenter claims fundamental design decisions are “wrong” for them personally but does not elaborate; specific criticisms remain unclear.