I would never use it under any circumstance of my choosing, since it's a dynamically typed language and I don't have any further need for any more of those at the moment; in fact only looking to cut down on my usage of them.
But from my experience working with it on real projects:
- Good tutorials, combined with library and build tooling integration for usage with GraalVM. Startup times make it a horrible fit for anything other than long-lived daemons.
- Speaking of build systems: more ecosystem coalescing around tools.deps, there's a lot of resources around Leiningen, not too many around the blessed native tooling (I know, I know, it's fairly new for Clojure standards, but it is a problem).
- More and better linters for popular libraries. Without good types, you need something to guide you when you're misusing an API; the team where I worked with Clojure lost a lot of time getting Reagent patterns wrong.
My final complaint is something that I don't think can't ever be fixed without undoing what makes Clojure, Clojure:
REPL-driven development combined with dynamic typing, in the same way as its cousin: debugger-driven development, often leads to write-only code that works but good luck using it or modifying it if you don't have good automated tests to tell you how it's supposed to be used and more importantly how it's not.
It doesn't help that tests are de-emphasized by the community precisely because of REPL-driven development. "Just put it on the REPL and see what it does" is not a good way of reasoning about code, and makes it easy and convenient to just pile on more hacks that may or may not break something instead of promoting understanding. "Just write good code and have discipline, you're doomed if you can't do that anyway" does not excuse that other languages have radically different tools and practices that lead to far fewer footguns.
But from my experience working with it on real projects:
- Good tutorials, combined with library and build tooling integration for usage with GraalVM. Startup times make it a horrible fit for anything other than long-lived daemons.
- Speaking of build systems: more ecosystem coalescing around tools.deps, there's a lot of resources around Leiningen, not too many around the blessed native tooling (I know, I know, it's fairly new for Clojure standards, but it is a problem).
- More and better linters for popular libraries. Without good types, you need something to guide you when you're misusing an API; the team where I worked with Clojure lost a lot of time getting Reagent patterns wrong.
My final complaint is something that I don't think can't ever be fixed without undoing what makes Clojure, Clojure:
REPL-driven development combined with dynamic typing, in the same way as its cousin: debugger-driven development, often leads to write-only code that works but good luck using it or modifying it if you don't have good automated tests to tell you how it's supposed to be used and more importantly how it's not.
It doesn't help that tests are de-emphasized by the community precisely because of REPL-driven development. "Just put it on the REPL and see what it does" is not a good way of reasoning about code, and makes it easy and convenient to just pile on more hacks that may or may not break something instead of promoting understanding. "Just write good code and have discipline, you're doomed if you can't do that anyway" does not excuse that other languages have radically different tools and practices that lead to far fewer footguns.