Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links (clojure.org)
127 points by adityaathalye 9 hours ago
mkw5053 7 hours ago
In a previous life, I wrote Clojure every day and still look back fondly attending Clojure/Conj and sitting next to Rich Hickey and other Clojure greats at dinner.
My first startup was all Clojure. AWS only had a dozen or two products and I think we must have been the first to compile Clojure to JS and run it on Lambda in production (the only runtime was Node.js 0.10 at the time).
Anyway, I cannot wait to watch this
throwawaygod 7 minutes ago
What are you using now? how do you feel about clojure now?
mkw5053 2 minutes ago
I’m no longer in a professional engineering position and have a family and toddler so less time for learning about or playing with program languages. Clojure is what really made me first start thinking about programming languages and down the rabbit hole of scala and Haskell and idris and type theory books. Which are incredible and I can’t recommend more and also not remotely practical.
xmonkee 2 hours ago
How do you feel about it now? Like holistically.
mkw5053 6 minutes ago
I miss it. I’m now more removed and building software as a means to an end.
I miss it just like I miss the program language and type theory group meetups in SF and working through problems in dependently types languages like Idris and being out of my depth.
christophilus 3 hours ago
Excellent. The only thing I wish they had added was borkdude.
iLemming 3 hours ago
Yes, sad there's no European presence (unless I missed someone). There's tons of Clojure over there. Metosin, Juxt, Borkent, Gaiwan (Arne), Flexiana, Peter Strömberg (Calva), Dustin Getz (hyperfiddle/electric), Christophe Grand (ClojureDart), Bojidar (CIDER), Renzo, and many, many more.
ajdegol 5 hours ago
didn't know datomic was free of licensing fees - I didn't use it back in the day because the cost was prohibitive... interesting
agentifysh 6 hours ago
is clojure still relevant in the post agentic coding reality that opens up pretty much all esoteric languages to everyone ?
back in the day used to use clojure to write a fintech app but not sure if it is still relevant has uses vs other langs that have emerged
iLemming 3 hours ago
I find it actually the best substrate to write AI tooling. All my custom MCPs are written in Clojure (bb). You hook up the agent to the REPL and let it go wild - it builds something nice. Also, Clojure is one of the most token efficient PLs.
hsaliak 4 hours ago
Clojure had lousy error messages, agents deal with this well. Clojure is capable of producing some of the most dense code I’ve ever seen, so manual code reviews really start to feel like a bottleneck unless your goal is to level up.
MarkMarine 4 hours ago
One of the main problems I have with the models coding is the feedback loop is way down the chain from generation, it's out at the commit boundary for python when your hooks are running, maybe at the point where the model wants to push a PR. The REPL lets that happen during generation, and the other safety measures help immensely. Immutable data, STM, all of the features in Clojure that gave devs super powers now do the same for a model.
netbioserror 6 hours ago
Clojure might be the least esoteric language ever. Call a function, get a value.
agentifysh 5 hours ago
It definitely is more "mainstream" than others but I just don't see the same level of attention and enthusiasm around it anymore. I'm sure it is still being used in many places but like Elixir, hiring remains on the tough end.
iLemming 3 hours ago
yogthos 5 hours ago
Clojure is more relevant than ever in post agentic coding because of immutability and the REPL. The two big problems with agentic coding is context growing in unbounded fashion, and agents being able to get quick feedback on what they're doing. Mainstream languages fail on both accounts. I've found Clojure has been a great fit for keeping agents on track.
I've wrote about this in more detail here if you're interested https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-02-25-ai-at-scale.html
TacticalCoder 5 hours ago
Incredible: I had not idea NuBank discovered Datomic first and that it's Datomic that led them to Clojure, 100 million+ customers, and eventually acquiring Cognitect.
Good to see David Nolen (aka "swanodette") is in the documentary too.
As a bonus here's a recent talk from David Nolen about Clojure/ClojureScript and using DOM morphing instead of React.
If you don't want to watch it all, just take two minutes to watch from 23m15s to 25m15s. He compares a behemoth slurping all the browser's CPU and RAM resources versus a 13 Kb of JavaScript + Web components and DOM morphing:
His talk is presented from Emacs, gotta love that too...
mkw5053 5 hours ago
I don't know if it's still the case, but at old clojure conferences, or meetups, or places of employment, emacs was a prereq and assumed (and the most enjoyable)
ares623 6 hours ago
AI slop Rich is gross considering his stance on it. I guess it's up to the producers but very tone deaf.
iLemming 2 hours ago
You know there's a saying in Russian, that roughly translates to: "an expert surgeon is capable of helping a bad dancer", which is on itself is a reference to another idiom: "a bad dancer always blames his own balls".
That's quickly becoming befitting for cases like this - so often people rush to blame AI without even trying to use their own reasoning. I don't know what to say, hope you find a good surgeon, because it is obvious - you're shit of a dancer.
lsh0 12 minutes ago
"A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools" might be the western equivalent.
TacticalCoder 5 hours ago
The very official Clojure page in TFA links to clojure-mcp (written by the person who created figwheel: a famous ClojureScript library in the Clojure ecosystem) and other AI resources related to Clojure.
It's not because Rich doesn't want AI-generated pull-requests by people then taking credits that the Clojure community is anti-AI.
I use Claude Code CLI daily with Clojure, just not in a "write me five thousands lines of Clojure code I won't read" type of way.
mkw5053 6 hours ago
Are you watching the same thing I am? What AI slop?
Jeaye 6 hours ago
I think they mean the video thumbnail, which may or may not be AI-generated.
FelipeCortez 6 hours ago
Fitzero 21 minutes ago
agentifysh 6 hours ago
As you demonstrated, AI is not needed to write slop, just because AI is involved doesn't make it slop. We are still very much in the control even if it is generation.