State of Clojure Community 2021 | Hacker News Reader

State of Clojure Community 2021

surveymonkey.com

13 pointsfulafel6 comments

Some interesting nuggets:

"what was your primary development language" -> Python+JS+Ruby are each smaller than Java, but together the dynamic languages are a noticeably bigger source of Clojure adopters than Java expats.

26% of respondents reported they are "Creating/maintaining open source libraries", vs 70% reported they're using Clojure primarily for work. Good number but would have been interesting to know how many for-work users publish OS libs.

Of domains, "Math/data analysis" users are 18% and "Big data" 12%.. that's together ~30%.

ClojureScript is used quite a lot to target non-browser environments. Node, React Native, AWS Lambda, Electron all have a lot of usage.

Error messages are the favourite area of improvement. It seems the rework in Clojure 1.10 to generate spec-based syntax error messages wasn't the cure that was hoped.

Please notice macOS usage as development OS. And we’re talking about emacs as main editor. I wonder how macOS usage plots in general for other programming languages. I’m guessing macOS is in front by far compared to anything else. Now what does it mean if you start thinking M1/ARM paired with unprecedented enthusiasm to make all dev languages/tools ARM supported. Intel is in big, big trouble. I don’t care what investors think (intel hangs on the market well so far). From developer’s point of view intel looks almost dead.

Hm, not sure how it supposed to work. For the absolute majority of devs hardware is abstracted away behind the thick walls of IDE/editors, VMs/runtumes, and OS APIs (especially true for JVM, and js hosted PLs such as Clojure) and neither care that much, nor contribute to layers of software important for CPU market.

Simplified it goes like: devs are using macOS -> macOS moves to 100% ARM in relatively short time -> devs prefer same deployment architecture -> cloud providers don't mind (because it has higher shit done/coal burnt rate) -> intel has a problem.

To rephrase - I believe that "what developers use" is _underestimated_ proxy of "what world will soon use".

Look at the 2020 survey and you'll see macOS has lost ground.

Both Linux and Windows+WSL have gained ground.

I know several folks who've switched from macOS to either Linux or Windows+WSL (I'm in the latter group -- after being an Apple customer since the early '90s: so I've already gone through two chipset migrations with Apple).

A lot of shops are more heterogeneous, with mixed linux/windows/mac usage. One change I can think of is that arm macs can't run the same docker images. But all dev tooling has been ported ages ago by the linux-on-arm community.

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