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
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
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:
His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...
That's quickly becoming befitting for cases like this - so often people rush to blame AI without even trying to use their own reasoning. I don't know what to say, hope you find a good surgeon, because it is obvious - you're shit of a dancer.
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've wrote about this in more detail here if you're interested https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html
The industry should have optimized for hiring people interested in PLs like Clojure instead of LeetCode drillers. Clojure is rarely the first, second, or even third programming language people choose to learn. It demands a specific vision, dedication, and discipline that fundamentally transforms how people think about computation, data flow, distributed systems, and concurrency. The ROI from hiring an average developer experienced in Clojure has the potential to significantly exceed that of a typical hire.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/cultrepo.bsky.social/post/3mjhubrh3...
- 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://www.slantmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/tem...
Watched the documentary and want to dig in? Here are a few terms you’ll encounter.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Lisp |
|
A family of programming languages that represent code as nested lists enclosed in parentheses. Clojure is a Lisp dialect.
| |
REPL
|
Read-Eval-Print Loop. An interactive session that reads an expression, evaluates it, prints the result, and repeats. Clojure developers use the REPL to build and test programs while they run.
| |
Functional programming
|
A programming style built around functions that take values and return values, minimizing mutable state and side effects.
| |
Value
|
A piece of data that does not change after creation: a number, a string, or a persistent collection. Clojure defaults to values; you opt in to mutable state explicitly when you need it.
| |
Persistent data structure
|
A collection that preserves its previous version when you modify it. Adding an element returns a new collection; the original remains unchanged. "Persistent" here means version-preserving, not stored to disk.
| |
Accidental complexity
|
Difficulty in software caused by your tools and design choices, not by the problem itself. Contrasted with essential (or incidental) complexity, which is inherent to the problem domain.
| |
STM
|
Software Transactional Memory. A concurrency model that coordinates shared-state changes through transactions instead of locks.
| |
Hosted language
|
A language designed to run on an existing platform rather than its own runtime. Clojure runs on the JVM, ClojureScript compiles to JavaScript, and ClojureCLR targets the .NET CLR.
|
