it's not even in the top 50 here: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/. Lisp is 26.
For some reason I doubt this is in any way representative of the real world. Scratch, which is a teaching language for children, bigger than PHP? Which is smaller than Rust? Yeah, these are results you get when you look at the Internet, alright.
Let's be honest and avoid painting a misleading picture. Getting a job as a software developer of any kind is genuinely difficult right now. Finding a position on a Clojure team has always been relatively harder for various reasons - and not simply because of its [in]popularity.
Clojure tends to attract older, more experienced developers. If you want a full-time Clojure role but have no prior experience with it, you'll often need to accept a junior-level salary - something many seasoned developers can't afford or simply won't do.
Junior developers have it even harder. Recruiting pipelines don't really distinguish between experience levels - everyone goes through roughly the same process, and juniors are expected to keep up with veterans, with almost no room for error.
Senior, battle-tested Clojure devs face a different kind of pressure. Interviews are frequently grueling, mentally exhausting sessions comparable to architect-level evaluations in other places. And because Clojure enables small, skilled teams to accomplish a lot, companies rarely need to hire in bulk - so competition for each opening is fierce.
This creates a frustrating situation for everyone, companies included. They want top-tier talent but offer junior salaries, while simultaneously rejecting juniors and anyone without direct Clojure experience. Supply and demand are badly out of balance.
That breeds resentment - "why bother learning it if I'll never get hired?" Honestly, there's no clean answer, and Rust seems to be in a similar spot right now. Even so, the language is worth learning. It has real practical value, even when you're not using it on a team. The future-proof choice I believe is to learn both - Rust and Clojure. Exploring both of these languages, I can honestly think things will change in their favor. Unless you want to stay sad at nearly-burnout levels for the next decade or more with TS/Python/Java/etc.
If we've measured the value of jobs by their popularity, everyone would want to be a retail salesperson or a cashier - according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, these are most common occupations in the States. People still writing Clojure professionally after 15 years (of other languages) are disproportionately serious engineers. The language self-selects. Small community means concentrated competence, not weakness. The network effect assumption is wrong here - a programming language isn't a social network. A better hammer isn't worse because fewer people own one. Most job listings reflect what organizations already know how to hire for, not what produces the most value.
Besides, the community and ecosystem is large enough that there are multiple online spaces for you to get help, and personally I've been a "professional" (employed + freelancing) Clojure/Script developer for close to 7 years now, never had any issues finding new gigs or positions, also never had issues hiring for Clojure projects either.
Sometimes "big enough" is just that, big enough :)
Every problem people face is "not a problem" or "actually a good thing" or, maybe if all else fails we can make users feel bad about themselves. Clojure is intended for "well experienced, very smart developers". Don't you know, our community skews towards very senior developers! So if you don't like something, maybe the problem is just that you're not well experienced enough? Or, maybe what you work on is just too low-brow for our very smart community!
How about just "different"? Turtle want to teach everyone to program, that's fine, just another way of building and maintaining a language. Clojure is clearly not trying to cater to the "beginner programmer" crowd, and while you might see it as "unhealthy attitude", I'd personally much prefer to realize having many different languages for different people is way better than every language trying to do the same thing for the same people. Diversity in languages is a benefit in my eyes, rather than a bad thing.
Don't worry, I don't think anyone took your comments as "attacking Clojure", I certainly didn't :)
