Clojurians Log v2

@ericnormand hi Eric, listening to your recent podcast on community growth. Do you know where someone can go to get a more concrete idea of growth? I would probably start with the clojure survey, but I cannot recall how much is public. One idea would be to build or promote some bridge materials from other languages. I think Java and js are well covered, but I could probably do a python to clojure. I would need help, but maybe we could make it a community effort?

I imagine its taxing to engage in these kinds of effort because they tend to be hard to track and have little personal reward! Imagine trying to promote Scala within the clojure community to an get idea Maybe we should just build a version of clojure that complies to python, so we can get all the great libs that compile python to c. :thinking_face:

i dont think just going to other communities and proselytizing would be very effective tbh. If you look at other language growth it's usually around some area that they dominate or they have some powerful forces behind them. Go has google, for example, Microsoft can push .NET, Javascript has gotten really popular because it makes making services "easier" (or perhaps people see it as more accessible than traditional server-side languages). Although I guess rallying around a major software suite doesnt always necessarily work for growth. Erlang, for example, isn't super popular even though RabbitMQ is fairly widely used.

tl;dr there needs to be a clojure project that lots of people use 😄

or a big company that adopts clojure very publicly

Killer libraries make a big difference. Ruby grew around rails

Well a company is already behind clojure, so I cannot help there :). As to, big libs/frameworks, if onyx and reframe cannot do it I don't know what can. So you both think that marketing the community as is, isn't going to help much?

i'm not a community development expert, just a user, so take what i say with a grain of salt. I'm expressing "an opinion" rather than "an informed opinion" or "an expert opinion".

understandable! thanks for your input

@drewverlee Actively "growing" a language community is hard. As @jgh says, you really can't proselytize in other communities. The most you can do is just be visible and public about how much you enjoy Clojure, so others might think "Oh, maybe I'll try Clojure then".

that said the Fn guys said I should write a medium article about making my Clojure FDK so I'm going to do some shilling...

Clojure gets coverage at Strange Loop and at some (mostly) Java conferences when folks submit talks about solving some interesting problem (and how Clojure just happened to make it so much easier). Blogging/writing articles for (online) magazines is always good exposure.

I remained active in the CFML community after I started doing Clojure and that caused several CFML folks to try Clojure and some have switched while others have at least learned enough to stick with it as a hobby language.

I've spoken at CFML conferences and user groups about Clojure (both here in the US and in Australia).

Some of that I've couched as general FP -- showing how to do FP in CFML and also in Clojure.

@drewverlee I wrote a bit about community growth a while back: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/8pcjg6/the_state_of_developer_ecosystem_2018_infographic/e0d6191/