HN commenters love using anecdata. So please allow me to use one and speculate on this phenomenon. So we have a product. Three devs wrote the initial prototype. Then over time, they hired five more. For three years we've organically grown our codebase, adding more and more integrations. The business expanded and grew enormously. We had to deal with a lot of pain, trying to grapple with enormous amounts of data and constantly changing requirements. In addition to tons of back-end services, we also had to build three different web apps. The company had to hire two additional PMs and two more designers. But we've managed to hold the fort with the small team as we were. Occasionally, the question about hiring more devs would come up, and we interviewed people. A person one day left (for some fabulous offer) and we had to quickly hire a replacement. I no longer work there and they hired only two more after I left.
I mean, I can keep going with the story, but I think you get the gist of it. Clojure allows building enormously big operations with a handful of developers. I just can't imagine building and maintaining all that in other stacks. And as it turns out, even when we needed to add new product features, we didn't have to hire a new team for that. And the business was not restricted by the pace of our development. We continued adding new features and kept supporting the existing ones.
This is a very subjective example case, of course. But it makes me want to ask: if we didn't have to hire more developers, and I don't think I ever heard of any company massively trying to expand their Clojure teams, how would then Clojure grow? Is creating new Clojure-based startups the only answer?
It's been growing ever so slightly all this time if Maven downloads are to be believed, but it has also been on a downward trend in the hype cycle for the past few years ever since Rich Hickey stepped back from the limelight.
