I'm not sure what you are arguing. Clojure is a cool language, with a small community, and declining interest. Why do you think searches trend down if interest isn't trending down.
You can still be adding a few new libraries, and some new users while interest declines. Clojure had the potential to be the default Lisp, the default functional language, and perhaps the default alternative to the c family of languages. Unfortunately, it is heading towards being just another niche language. Tooling is a big problem, not because the once you learn emacs and cider it is insufficient, but because it is a pain to setup and learn emacs and cider. Not because Atom and proto-repl are bad tools, but because to get it set up you need 10 plugins and 20 config setting and it ends up being fragile - complected in a major way. Another part of the problem is that Clojure advocates vastly overvalue the what unique benefits Clojure adds things like hot reloading and the REPL. Clojure and ClojureScript might have better or more pure implementations, but everyone has some form of these features now. It isn't a compelling argument to say switch to Clojure, change programming paradigms, learn Lisp, learn emacs, learn java, so you can get a hot reload that is 15% better than what you have now.
BTW, when I started getting interested in Clojure, one of the videos I learned from was your Philly ETE presentation. So I have a lot of respect for where you are coming from, but I wish the Clojure community was less defensive, and more unified around a strategy to promote and grow the language.
The claim that there's declining interest is absurd, and that's what I'm arguing. Google trends are simply not a measure of anything interesting in practice. It's about as useful as throwing around TIOBE rankings.
>Tooling is a big problem, not because the once you learn emacs and cider it is insufficient, but because it is a pain to setup and learn emacs and cider. Not because Atom and proto-repl are bad tools, but because to get it set up you need 10 plugins and 20 config setting and it ends up being fragile - complected in a major way.
It's quite clear you haven't used Clojure tooling if that's your impression of it. Again, Clojure has some of the best tooling I've used in any language and I've been doing development for around 2 decades now. Intellij and Cursive are a fantastic combination that takes minutes to install. Calva is another great option for VS Code and it's also a one click install. Both these projects are actually being funded. Cursive is a commercial product and Calva is funded via Clojurists Together. Both Cursive and Calva show just how much the community has grown, since people and companies are willing to pay for tooling nowadays. That's a real measure of growth.
>Another part of the problem is that Clojure advocates vastly overvalue the what unique benefits Clojure adds things like hot reloading and the REPL. Clojure and ClojureScript might have better or more pure implementations, but everyone has some form of these features now.
>It isn't a compelling argument to say switch to Clojure, change programming paradigms, learn Lisp, learn emacs, learn java, so you can get a hot reload that is 15% better than what you have now.
Switching to Clojure provides far more benefits than just having hot reloading, and these benefits are very convincing for plenty of companies using Clojure today. These benefits also tend to appeal predominantly to experienced developers: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#work-_-salary...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
You can still be adding a few new libraries, and some new users while interest declines. Clojure had the potential to be the default Lisp, the default functional language, and perhaps the default alternative to the c family of languages. Unfortunately, it is heading towards being just another niche language. Tooling is a big problem, not because the once you learn emacs and cider it is insufficient, but because it is a pain to setup and learn emacs and cider. Not because Atom and proto-repl are bad tools, but because to get it set up you need 10 plugins and 20 config setting and it ends up being fragile - complected in a major way. Another part of the problem is that Clojure advocates vastly overvalue the what unique benefits Clojure adds things like hot reloading and the REPL. Clojure and ClojureScript might have better or more pure implementations, but everyone has some form of these features now. It isn't a compelling argument to say switch to Clojure, change programming paradigms, learn Lisp, learn emacs, learn java, so you can get a hot reload that is 15% better than what you have now.
BTW, when I started getting interested in Clojure, one of the videos I learned from was your Philly ETE presentation. So I have a lot of respect for where you are coming from, but I wish the Clojure community was less defensive, and more unified around a strategy to promote and grow the language.