Clojure: The Documentary, official trailer [video]

I'll never be as cool as them.

Rich Hickey, Alex Miller, Stu Holloway, Nathan Marz, and the other people in this video are all very impressive, intelligent people. But never undercount how much if their success is due to consistent effort. They worked hard at something they cared about with depth, and also longevity. Anyone can learn Clojure with a bit of skill and tenacity. Anyone can contribute to the community in a meaningful way. It takes effort though. Please join us and contribute back to the community in ways that help you scratch an itch, give it some polish, and then share it. Or join the forums on Clojurians on Zulip. Come to Clojure/Conj, it was fantastic last year.

Supposedly. If the productivity boost is good for commercial software it's good for open source.

Clojure is the language that made me "understand Lisp", as originally stated by Eric Raymond and citet by Paul Graham: https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

It seems like a small thing, but Clojure's choice to open up for other types of parentheses made seeing the structure of lisp programs much easier. This helped me understand how code is data and how macros are functions that can transform both code and data.

An important design philosophy (which is also hinted at in the trailer) is "simplicity". Clojure is designed to give you the tools to build simple solutions to the problems that you want to solve. It approaches mutability, which is one of the key sources of complexity in programming, with immutable data structures. It's a really clever way to do functional programming where your data is copied a lot but the copies are lightweight.

I don't write Clojure any more these days. I'm mostly doing Rust. But it is true what Eric Raymond said: Lisp has made me a better programmer.

Also: XKCD 224 and 297

I've been running my business for 10 years now, relying on Clojure and ClojureScript. It is amazing to be able to base one's livelihood on a foundation that is so stable and well designed. Clojure has been designed by a very smart and very experienced person, and it shows. It has then been maintained and extended by a team built around a culture of maturity and stability, and the result is something you can rely on.

The fact that I can use the same language to develop business model code that runs on both the client and the server, or that I don't have to use a different on-the-wire format for sending data between them (EDN does the job great) is just icing on the cake in this context.

I am very thankful to Rich and the entire Clojure (and ClojureScript) teams for giving me access to all their work (for free!).

BTW, if you haven't seen any of Rich's talks, go see them — they are worth it even if you do not intend to use Clojure.