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Comment by xmonkee | Hacker News Reader

I use Clojure for almost everything now, but I must say Haskell looks interesting. My issue is that Clojure is thriving right now, and Haskell has been around longer than I've been and the world sees it as some arcane science. Is it really worth investing my time to learn it if it's really not being used that much?

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It seems fair to say that Lisp was also considered arcane for a number of years, although it is now (somewhat) thriving in the form of Clojure. It's a tough question to answer, but I think you're really asking whether it's better to take a chance of being any sort of early adopter, or wait until it's generally accepted.

Even though these languages have been around for decades, they are just recently being spliced into the mainstream via lambdas, immutability, etc. So I could easily see Haskell make a comeback.

Relative to Haskell, Clojure is certainly thriving. Consider:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure%2C+haskell%2C+scal...

But they both lag Scala.

A sense of perspective?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure%2C+haskell%2C+scal...

I think you might be overestimating the actual usage of Clojure. It's still very much a niche language.

Everything I've observed suggests that Scala has a far greater rate of adoption than Clojure, and Scala's usage is still basically irrelevant compared to that of the major entrenched languages. I'd put the adoption of Haskell closer to that of Scala than I would to Clojure.

> My issue is that Clojure is thriving right now

Maybe on Silicon Valey startups.

In Europe I see a lot of Scala, Haskell, F# taking up in the finance and insurance areas for data modelling.

The boring enterprise is all about Java, C# and VB variants.

I do like Clojure, and it is the most successful Lisp dialect but it is far from thriving.

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