Okay, here's my take on the implicit narrative here: Clojure is done. It will continue to improve, people will continue to use it and build cool things with it, but maintainers are burnt out, mostly because there aren't enough of them and partly because of the passive-aggressive relationship Cognitect has with the community.
There's a whole bunch of languages with small dedicated communities doing interesting stuff. D and Julia occur to me off the top of my head. It's not "failure" that Clojure doesn't really challenge Kotlin or Scala for mindshare. It's nonetheless disappointing for people like me who used to be really excited by Clojure's potential.
Could it have been different? I don't know. The powers that be could definitely have been more committed to growing the base, but it never seems to have interested them. Would it have made a difference? I honestly don't know.
There's a whole bunch of languages with small dedicated communities doing interesting stuff. D and Julia occur to me off the top of my head. It's not "failure" that Clojure doesn't really challenge Kotlin or Scala for mindshare. It's nonetheless disappointing for people like me who used to be really excited by Clojure's potential.
Could it have been different? I don't know. The powers that be could definitely have been more committed to growing the base, but it never seems to have interested them. Would it have made a difference? I honestly don't know.