Ask HN: is Clojure a good all-purpose programming language?

There are some issues you are going to face, there's no way around them. First the tooling, it is beautiful in it's own right but takes a while to get used to. Leiningen is the preferred build tool, it cleanly handles almost everything for you but learning it seems to the beginner like just another thing preventing them from getting productive. You will miss your debugger for a while, until you realize having a debugger allowed you to write confusing, messy code that could be funged into working. There are many editors available, but when switching to clojure I decided to also learn Emacs 24 and now use it as my primary editor for every language/document.

Second is productivity, coming from php/js you will simply not have the background to lay down code quickly, let alone for-see potential issues. It took me approx. 5 months of study, every single day, to reach a comfortable point in the language where I could pump out Clojure code at a faster rate than C# code. I'm not even sure if it is faster or just my Clojure code doesn't have as many issues or is architecturally more sound. Why I feel more productive is a mixmash of things that I could probably write a book about. It's also very strange doing java interop with Clojure constructs. I often find myself getting caught up on clojure's lazyness or lack of types. Once you get a handle on it though it is extremely simple and my preferred way to write java code.

Lastly, I seem to have poisoned my brain a bit with these ideas, I approach almost every problem now as a functional one, yielding crappy looking C# code. I often have to take a step back, stop trying to make things fit into a functional category that are clearly OO.

I am risking sounding like an evangelical but Clojure has changed every aspect of programming for me, and made it fun again. I find getting in "the zone" is much easier when things seem to spookily just work. Looking at problems through the Clojure lens more often than not resolves in a simple, composable solution.

If "mobile" means "Android", then I think you are right. For iOS, I don't think there's a mature enough way to make a native app with clojure (but PhoneGap with ClojureScript should work).

Finally, if "all-purpose" means things you can deploy on the JVM or on JS, then yes. If you wanted to make something like a device driver, I'd say no.