I don't know why more people aren't pointing this out. It's almost as though people don't realize how much the value of Clojure comes from the community. Or aren't aware that many of the most helpful and constructive members of that community are burning out and leaving.

There was an almost apologist attitude towards rough edges or failure modes folks new to the community would fall into. I managed to work with it for a time despite that, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It's really important to make your ecosystem and communities welcome to new users or they're destined to fade.

I'm also not that sure the community contributes as much as you think. I use Clojure for work, and 95% of all value is from the core team only. I'm not trying to say the community is bad, I'm part of it, mostly trying to point out that it actually is quite disproportionate in relation to the core team, and I don't think we can criticize them until we (the community) actually step up and start being a lot more helpful and constructive.

But I disagree that it reflects poorly on the maintainers—rather, I think it illustrates that, for the most part, Clojure was created by experienced language pragmatists, for other experienced pragmatists. Clojure tends to be a refuge from other languages, not something a person is born into. The State of Clojure each year consistently shows how many other languages Clojure users already knew before coming to the language. I appreciate how the maintainers value backwards-compatibility (nothing ever breaks, it only gets better), that they are strongly committed to making the language great in the long run, and are unmoved from the language's founding values.

I do hope as a community we can do a better job for newcomers, for all our sakes—new blood brings new perspectives, but it's okay that "growing the community" isn't the Core team's top priority. (But hopefully becomes someone's priority in the community at some point...)

Even one of the most prolific Clojure users with a tremendous track record of extremely well engineered and practically useful libraries, Zach Tellman, has been bitten by Rich Hickey's / the core team's NIH syndrome[0]. That's no way to treat the people who love your language.

[0] http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1517

Some language comparisons: Perl got where it is on the strength of its community which now supports many language-focused businesses. Community is also cited as one of the strengths of Python and Ruby which also have associated thriving businesses. Community is regularly cited as a problem with LISP (wait, wait, hold the spears - I'm a LISPer too!). PTL Scheme is the exception that seems to prove the rule - good community there.

Languages and tools do prosper and my point here is to highlight how they do so by building a community and what Clojure's "core" risk through making this distinction.

I see I may initiate a language dispute and that is not my intention. Other projects just seem the best source of supporting comparisons.

There's relatively small but vocal Emacs community. There are no books being published; almost no podcasts; it took forever to organize a conference, but they still couldn't find a venue, so it was a video-conference. Every few years there's a new "Emacs killer" but the ecosystem (after over 40 years) is very much alive and thriving.

Same thing can be said about Clojure. It's a very vibrant ecosystem and there's a lot happening in Clojuresphere, but of course, with almost every post about Clojure, there would be at least one person to claim - "Clojure is dying." Well, if that's true, then buckle-up folks. It's going to be a very long, steady ride.

There is some community effort to better fund the core infrastructure in Clojure through https://www.clojuriststogether.org/, hopefully they can continue to attract more funding developers and companies.

In general a lot of these issues could be alleviated if the community was just in general larger with more contributors. I think the Clojure community is quite welcoming to newbies in the sense that people are quite responsive, kind and helpful around the internet, in Clojurians Slack (try asking there btw, if you haven't yet and are still stuck at the start of the book), etc. But in other ways people seem averse to criticism or suggestions from outsiders. I think the Clojure world needs to do a bit of self reflection to understand why adoption is so low right now and honestly consider what needs to change to attract more developers and contributors.

Where did you experience this? That is unacceptable in most of the Clojure communities I know, and the only big one I don't know personally is the subreddit.

(I am not suggesting the subreddit is toxic.)

Oddly, it seems to me that Clojure (the established people in its community) don't really care if anyone is attracted to it.

It seems like the people who come to Clojure do so because they caught a glimpse of it somewhere, did some digging and searching, and decided to give it a try. Not exactly the same as Sun spending $500 million to market Java.

That's not to suggest the Clojure community is unwelcoming or silent, but they generally fly under the radar.

Several years ago I went to a few of the Amsterdam Clojure meetup group meetings, and at that time there were 10 to 20 people there.

Meanwhile, the Elixir meetup would have 20-40! And Elixir was still comparatively young. Of course the Ruby meetup group was even larger, but that's no surprise given the prevalence of Rails in business.