Lesson 3. Clojure in the industry
After reading this lesson, you will be able to:
- Describe what kind of projects are suited for Clojure and why they are suited
- Describe what kind of projects are not suited for Clojure and why they are not suited
Clojure is considered a general purpose language. In theory, it could be used for writing software in the widest variety of application domains. But in practice, there are some domains where the key features of Clojure make it a good choice and some domains where it is less appropriate to use Clojure.
In general, we can say that Clojure has been really well adopted in the field of web development.
Table 3.1 This table summarizes the kind of projects where Clojure is best suited or not and the main reasons
| Project |
Best suited for Clojure |
Main reasons |
| Web servers |
Yes |
Rely on solid java frameworks Highly scalable |
| Microservices |
Yes |
Data manipulation facilities |
| Big data |
Yes |
Data manipulation facilities |
| Complex frontend web applications |
Yes |
Immutability |
| Shell Scripts |
No |
JVM startup time |
| Infrastructure projects |
No |
Non native |
| Mobile apps |
No |
No mature ecosystem |
| Simple frontend web applications |
No |
Non native |