d_t_w

Clojure has some limited support for Java annotations, it's just that support is a bit ungainly, and that introduces enough difficulty that it leads to frameworks like Quarkus having no real adoption in the Clojure community.

Quarkus also relies on byte-code rewriting which may also cause difficulty for Clojure, but that's an aside.

Better annotations support wouldn't necessarily improve the ease of annotation-driven web frameworks in Clojure because the issue is more fundamental than that.

The real problem for Clojure is, from the original article:

> It's because in Jakarte EE 11 Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) officially becomes the single, unified component model across the entire enterprise Java ecosystem ... CDI is entirely driven by annotations, and annontations are entirely not Clojurish.

What I mean here specifically is CDI is the 'blessed' solution for DI in Java, CDI is clearly derived from many years of innovation by Spring, other DI frameworks in Java. Annotations is the path forward.

That means DI in Java is driven at a code-oriented, not data-oriented. Code-oriented is more natural in Java, and to give you a counterpoint, when I first worked with Spring (and very briefly with Rod Johnson for a couple of weeks on a client engagement, boring story) it was possible to configure Spring in XML.

Spring XML would be the equivalent of data-oriented in Java. Nobody in Java wants to do that, they want annotations instead.

In the article I say:

> configuring systems in code is a pale imitation of configuring systems in data. I much prefer my data-oriented system config library in Clojure to annotations in Java.

As it turns out I wrote something on reddit about this recently, you can find that here:

Cannot recommend it enough - absolutely fantastic library, great documentation, zero issues of any impact to us in five years.

My only wish is for the keyboard accessibility ticket[2] to get some love!

We bootstrapped for 5 years to well over $1M+ ARR before recently closing a seed round[1], Clojure played a large part in our ability to deliver as a small team. Also in our general happiness as programmers, it is a nice language to work in.

We will grow our Clojure core product team over the next couple of years, but mostly the funding round is about balancing our business to keep up with our product delivery.

Clojure has been very good to me (I had 15 years on the JVM prior to moving to clj/cljs in 2013-ish). YMMV.

It is immensely satisfying to build something that you believe in and succeed in selling it. I founded my company in 2019 and my experiencing and motivations in bootstrapping mirror yours.

We are in year 4 (commercials) and 6 (product development) at Factor House[1].

We build enterprise tooling for streaming systems (Apache Kafka and Apache Flink mostly). Selling software to enterprise customers is different from B2C as the sales cycles can be endless and most likely your cashflow might be more lumpy, but at the end of the day it's a very powerful thing to be profitable and independent.

As @yevpats points out sometimes the bootstrapping story does miss some details, in our case we invested roughly $500k to get through the pre-commercial period, to achieve that we sold our house (my wife is also my co-founder). Not everyone can, or is mad enough, to commit resources at that early stage. To be honest we were quite mad.

Prior to starting product development with Factor House we ran a consultancy that delivered systems for enterprise customers based on Kafka, Storm, Cassandra, etc - so we had plenty of experience. We also had consultancy customers who were eager to use the pre-commercial versions of our product and provide feedback.

I also run a meetup[2] in my hometown that specialises in programming solutions with distributed systems.

Last year we took a small amount of funding from Lighter Capital (non-dilutive, fairly simple loan terms) to unlock some growth.

Bootstrapping is hard, but my interactions with VC left me with the impression that it's a low-information lottery for the benefit of those who already have capital.

It seemed clear that if we took funding we would rapidly lose control of our vision and we don't need to 100x our business to achieve our goals. I would rather focus on delivery for our users and avoid adopting manic ideas to pay off 99 failed lottery tickets.

I love JQ so much we implemented a subset of JQ in Clojure so that our users could use it to munge/filter data in our product (JVM and browser based Kafka tooling). One of the most fun coding pieces I've done, though I am a bit odd and I love writing grammars (big shoutout to Instaparse![1]).

I learned through my implementation that JQ is a LISP-2[2] which surprised me as it didn't feel obvious from the grammar.