About Clojure

To fully appreciate Clojure, we hearken back to Paul Graham’s essay “Beating the Averages,” an interesting look at the inner workings of his company Viaweb during the years before it was bought by Yahoo! Inc. in 1998.^[8] Although the essay is interesting as a survey of startup culture, the truly memorable part is the description of how Viaweb used the programming language Lisp as an advantage over its competition. How could a programming language more than 50 years old provide any market advantage versus Viaweb’s competitors, which were surely using modern enterprise technologies? We won’t repeat the exact terms of the essay, but Graham makes a compelling case for the capability of Lisp to facilitate a more agile programming environment.

⁸ April 2001, rev. April 2003, http://paulgraham.com/avg.html.

As it turns out, Clojure has gained amazing inroads into industry use since its creation and release in 2007. Many developers use Clojure and/or ClojureScript every day to create their software systems and products. Working software developers have discovered, as Graham describes in his essay, the joy and power of using Lisp. Although there is little doubt that Clojure’s slice of the proverbial pie for industry programming language use is humble, it’s growing from month to month. These are exciting times for the Clojure programming language.