Startup time isn't what is holding the language back. In my opinion it's:
1. Tooling. You end up spending way more time getting your tooling setup than it should be.
2. Difficulty in learning.
3. Clear best practices and frameworks. The philosophy of composing libraries is extremely powerful, but to gain broader adoption you still need straight forward frameworks and opinionated best practices.
The last point has many unintuitive consequences. Clojure tends to attract people who enjoy doing new things, or excelling in their craft. But mass adoption also means catering to people who need to do "boring" things where people just want to get their job done. For boring code, which is the reality for many developers, they just want a clear best practice to get the stuff done.
This could be a clear standard library or framework for a task, a clear architectural pattern, and it certainly means easy to access code snippets. There have been some attempts at these things, e.g. Luminous for the web, but the community hasn't rallied around them with enough weight to make newcomers comfortable.
So when faced with choosing: a testing library, any number of libraries compose into a web service, any number of approaches to client side, then in the end still having 100 equally good ways to architect a given piece of code that requires thinking mathematically, well, it's daunting. Especially when you are new to the language and just want to get your boring CRUD app working.
Maybe this is best summed up as saying that Clojure caters to the creative, but to gain widespread adoption it also needs to cater to those stuck writing boring code and just want to be done with it as fast as possible.
1. Tooling. You end up spending way more time getting your tooling setup than it should be. 2. Difficulty in learning. 3. Clear best practices and frameworks. The philosophy of composing libraries is extremely powerful, but to gain broader adoption you still need straight forward frameworks and opinionated best practices.
The last point has many unintuitive consequences. Clojure tends to attract people who enjoy doing new things, or excelling in their craft. But mass adoption also means catering to people who need to do "boring" things where people just want to get their job done. For boring code, which is the reality for many developers, they just want a clear best practice to get the stuff done.
This could be a clear standard library or framework for a task, a clear architectural pattern, and it certainly means easy to access code snippets. There have been some attempts at these things, e.g. Luminous for the web, but the community hasn't rallied around them with enough weight to make newcomers comfortable.
So when faced with choosing: a testing library, any number of libraries compose into a web service, any number of approaches to client side, then in the end still having 100 equally good ways to architect a given piece of code that requires thinking mathematically, well, it's daunting. Especially when you are new to the language and just want to get your boring CRUD app working.
Maybe this is best summed up as saying that Clojure caters to the creative, but to gain widespread adoption it also needs to cater to those stuck writing boring code and just want to be done with it as fast as possible.