Results from the State of Clojure, Summer 2010 Survey

Myself personally, I didn't find it that surprising that there were a lot of people interested in web work. I think it's self-selection; people in the web industry are far more amenable to trying new (also read as: unproven) technologies or languages.<p>But at the same time, everyone knows Java's got some really good infrastructural libraries for web work. Since nearly everyone in the web sphere works in some sort of dynamic language, it's unsurprising they'd try Clojure when it'd split the difference between Java's somewhat-famous libraries and a pure dynamic-typed language like Clojure.

I think the most compelling data here is the languages people came from: Java, Ruby, Python. And the languages they'd go to Scala, Haskell, Erlang et al.<p>Clojure as a gateway drug on the JVM for functional programming. Cool stuff.

I'm a bit sad that only few people come from a JavaScript background. My interest in Clojure arises directly from being spoiled by how hackable JavaScript is. I wanted that same level hackability but with performance and concurrency and an extra dose sanity. While I still live and breath JavaScript at work and play, JavaScript is a very crippled language by the very nature of its design (intended to run single threaded in the browser, subsequent snail's pace evolution because of this browser dependency). Clojure is a dynamic language hackers dream on so many levels - the FP stuff is often just icing!<p>I thoroughly recommend intermediate and advanced JavaScripters to give Clojure a good long look. You'll be blown away.

Interesting data, but the comment about political polls is a bit misleading. Political polls are a random sample of a target population and are designed to avoid biases. This is a voluntary survey with plenty of response bias, so I'd keep that in mind when drawing conclusions.

"Poor / incomprehensible error messages and stack traces are far and away the most common complaint."<p>I wonder if this is because of the high slime usage. The slime debugger doesn't play well with java exceptions because the stack gets unwound. JSwat is the advertised debugging option--wonder how many slime users have tried it.

I respect Clojure as a language, but I'd respect the community a lot more if they didn't oversell their language and didn't trash on competing languages so often.<p>As an example, the only time you hear Clojure mentioned in the Scala community is when it is being complimented or porting of one of its features to Scala is being discussed. On the other hand, The only time you hear Scala mentioned in the Clojure community is when it is being derided as an inferior creation to the mighty Clojure!<p>Even in this article, which is supposed to be about the community's response to Clojure, the author both ignores the fact that Scala is the next most favorite language of those interviewed and also reserves a nice bullet point at the end for putting it down.

3% of "I remember when #clojure had 6 people in it" =&#62; 200 persons answered this survey.

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