I was previously using Python for most of my work, but I have been moving more and more to Clojure. It has been discussed before, but some of the functional flavor of Python left me looking for more. I briefly looked at CL, Scheme, and Haskell, and each had clear upsides but none really got me excited.
When I found Clojure, I felt it was more readable, had access to many interesting libraries, and had performance that was as good or better than Python in many cases. The ease of concurrency/parallelism is also very slick, and I suspect it will come in handy to me down the road in our multi-core future. The rise of Incanter, an R-like statistical package, pretty much sealed the deal.
The biggest headache has been the need to work with Java's build systems (not because they suck but because I have no interest in learning them beyond what's required for Clojure).
I think it is both old-time Lisp'ers and JVM platform programmers looking for something more agile than Java.
I have been using Clojure for my work for several months and for me some of the big wins are:
1. easy to use existing Java libraries
2. lots of nice language features like destructuring, etc.
3. nice integration with Java and/or Scala projects with IntelliJ
4. fairly good runtime performance
And, a few hassles:
1. error stack traces have relatively little value.
2. The Clojure team is doing great work, but I still feel that the platform is not quite there yet compared with Java, Common Lisp, Haskell, etc.
I am in a patient mood in regards to Clojure: I use it for some things now, and expect my percentage use of Clojure over other languages will steadily increase over the next few years.
I use Clojure for a few odds and ends on a fairly regular basis now, but not having a Java background was a definite hurdle for me when I was starting to learn it. It was sometimes tough to tell if the problems I was having were Clojure related or Java related. The entire CLASSPATH paradigm was an issue for me until I realized what was going on.
For my current work task, I am using it for information extraction from Freebase which requires a lot of JSON manipulation. I was using Ruby but Clojure use is preferred at CompassLabs (both languages are well suited for Freebase data hacking).
I mostly use Java for Hadoop machine learning work, but I may transition to Clojure in the next few weeks (my CTO has suggested this).
Earlier this year, I added Clojure examples to my last book on the Semantic Web.
I compared those numbers to the TIOBE popularity of other languages and found that Ada and Scala developers are 7x more likely than their C# brethren to be interested in Clojure:
You are misled. There where not that many lispers in the first place so where should the come from? 5% come from Common Lisp guess how many Common lispers switched to scala. I don't know either but I don't belief that its more that 5%.
I wonder where I can get an RC1 build of the contrib jar. If it's a jar file, I wonder why you're supposed to build it yourself using mvn.
Edit: Don't have to build it. It's included in the zip file on the download page. The new clojure-contrib-1-2.0.jar is just significantly smaller than the version 1.1 and older.
Edit2: It appears you can indeed build on Windows if you skip the maven tests: mvn package -Dmaven.test.skip=true
Whether skipping maven tests is a good/bad thing I don't know.
Make sure you are getting the right repository. Once github began supporting organizations, we moved things to github.com/clojure (not github.com/richhickey).
You can get RC1 at the top of the download page (http://clojure.org/downloads). We would love to fix usability problems--let us know what got in your way of finding it.
I'm very new to Clojure (just 1-2 weeks) so pardon my ignorance/mistake. I noticed that the new clojure-contrib.jar was 466KB while the older ones were over 3MB. So I thought it was either a template or a sample file and tried to compile it myself on Windows. I got errors similar to the link in my parent post. But now I just extracted the file and it works.
So what happened that shrunk the contrib-jar that much in this version?
Much functionality was moved from clojure-contrib into new namespaces in clojure itself; clojure.jar is now bigger by roughly the same amount that clojure-contrib.jar shrank :)
I'm from a C#/.NET background, but have been incorporating more functional programming techniques into my programming in the last couple of years. This, combined with my deepening understanding of the f.p. aspects of JavaScript (after reading JS: The Good Parts) and an interest in Lisp (after reading On Lisp by Paul Graham) got me really interested in f.p., and I started picking up Clojure in my spare time. It struck me as a standardized Lisp with access to lots of great libraries, which overcomes two of the main previous disadvantages of Lisp. I'm hoping it becomes more mainstream in the years to come, as it's a lot of fun to work on, but not something I can make much use of at work, unfortunately.
