Runa is hiring Clojure developers

You must be flamebaiting, as others have indicated. While it is undoubtedly true that Java, C++ and the like are favoured on a wide basis, you entered the lion's den by coming here to attack Clojure. HN is one of the rare spots where you are going to see devotees to more obscure languages like that.

Trolling must be the only explanation, because

a) Doing data mining research and exploratory programming in a small company is probably the best use case for a Lisp. When you're Google you can afford to write this in C++ or Java (with layers of libraries taking the boiler plate out) as well waste research/prototype time on compile/link cycle (rather being able to program interactively). When you're Google, you can also afford to only hire machine learning people who know how to write production quality C++ (very rare combination of skills). Clojure is a more acceptable language: despite of what fanboys say, FP is not a black art reserved for 99.9th percentile programmers; the more C++ I write, the more convinced I get that C++ is.

b) Clojure interop with Java makes it easy to use this sort of system with Hadoop, Mahout, Colt, etc... Sure there are more effective libraries available in C++, but they either proprietary to Google (MapReduce + GFS), not designed for fault tolerance (MPI) or more time consuming to use (LINPACK, LAPACK)

c) Python is going to be 10-20 times slower, (perhaps 5x when you're using C interop).

Maybe I got started on wrong foot here: here is my analysis, hopefully non trollish

1. Their business seems to focused on analytics/data mining

2. In that case their primary requirement should be for people who have experience in distributed computing , map - reduce, data mining, visualization

3. Instead you find them talking about clojure, a language which has a very small user base and not at all used in ML / data mining.

4. This seems fishy I can name several startups identica, cellexis and other who are in nearly similar area, and you can have a look at their job requirements.

5. All above points lead me to conclude that this company is being run by people who focus too much on knowing a certain language, rather than focusing on tools of the trade. Which is un understandable.

6. It gives a feel that the company is looking for someone who can write automated sys admin scripts rather than work on acutal statistical models or interface. The latter two jobs are considered a bit more interesting than just cluster maintainace in clojure.

Regarding few points i made earlier: 1. Clojure is second class beacuse of lack of support or user group. 2. Regarding a comment by strlen on python not being used, python + hadoop streaming or python + c libraries are preffered solution in both research as well as production environments. There are also quite a few good C++ libraries such as SNAP.

In my opinion if you are ending up working with java after using clojure it makes more sense to code in java itself. This actually describes a perfect case of creating lisp in your language of choice situation.

From my personal experience, Amazon's ploy of suggesting related books has been very effective on me. I've often gone there with the intention of spending perhaps USD 40 on a specific book and ended up spending thrice that amount (happily!).

Hence a suggestion, FWIW: in addition to improving conversion rate, it might be also worthwhile to try to sell more stuff to existing customers. You know what they want and you know they're not averse to spending money online.