It seems really nice to work with but investing in a niche ecosystem that adds another layer of complexity on top of a tall stack is a hard sell for me personally
Clojure/Clojurescript gives us a language/toolset that works in both the front and back ends. In some cases we have we have code in a single source file (.cljc) that works in both the browser and on the JVM with no modification.
The feature that cross-environment functionality implements in a single source file is complex in some cases (e.g. a grammar / parser / interpreter for a subset of JQ).
Both the front and back end use the same core functions and same datastructures to implement the product. Data is moved between front/back via Transit (and encoding format for Clojure datastructures).
In my experience the reduction in complexity through the stack is staggering. Once you've learned Clojure that is..
Hence why I only play with them to learn about new concepts, but always go back to what gets delived in the box for production code.
Basically whatever gets added on top of what is available when platform XYZ SDK (or equivalent), gets installed on a fresh new computer.
It's still worth it for me personally, but I recon the additional challenge.
If you try babashka and nbb it won't feel as much of an extra layer, but they're both interpreted, so expect only Ruby like performance out of them. That said, it's a good way to get started if you don't want an extra layer under Clojure.
And if I want to build a web service, I reach for go because it’s faster and the memory footprint is much smaller. I guess maybe if I was working on a super complex project that justified using Clojure to build elaborate abstractions, I would use it, but most of what I work on is pretty straightforward.
ClojureScript I’ve avoided because I keep anything frontend-related that I work on as dead simple as humanly possible to avoid churn.
And babashka seems neat too but I’m already comfortable with bash, and shellcheck works well.
It sucks but I just can’t seem to find a good use case for Clojure, even though I love the tooling and the language.
Sometimes I use it for data analysis and visualization as well.
I use it at work and for personal stuff.
It's not that it has some awesome superior or full featured framework or feature for any one of those use cases, just that it's overall a language I like to use and which I have more fun with, and it's sufficient at everything you'd need to seriously use it for all those things. I prefer working interactively over a running program, I prefer the flexibility to extend language to my own needs with macros and higher order functions, I like the simplicity of working directly with data instead of ADTs or single use containers like Classes, I prefer structural editing for navigating and modifying source code, I prefer functional programming over OOP, I prefer immutable defaults and value semantics, and I prefer Clojure's well thought out core sequence manipulation functions.
My point is that Clojure is well rounded, there's a few things it's not good enough for, but those are rare, stuff like embedded systems, AAA games, high performance audio or video processing, raw number crunching, etc. For everything else Clojure is adequate, so it's just up to what you want to use, if you enjoy Clojure and it brings you joy, you can just use it, you don't need to find a perfect use case that it's uniquely best at.