Clojure

143 engineers on Hacker News describe using Clojure first-hand: 59 endorse it, 7 regret it, 9 are mixed.

84%trust
143first-hand users
81in production
endorse 59mixed 9regret 7uses, no opinion

“The big value add to me is that I can have a REPL and inspect, in dev (or in prod but that'd be wild), the app I'm working on.”

endorse · personal · TacticalCoder · 2026-06-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've used Clojure for countless hobby projects.”

endorse · personal · tmountain · 2026-03-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I don't regret the switch at all and have learned a lot from Clojure, and used it extensively for over a decade.”

endorse · personal · 10 yr · dkersten · 2025-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I used to do a lot of Clojure, and definitely appreciate your work on it!”

endorse · personal · xpe · 2024-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I also maintain older codebases and this is how I feel about Clojure. It's far too terse and the syntax is nigh unreadable”

regret · production · temporallobe · 2024-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure works best when you can write short, simple code and fall into the pit of success.”

endorse · production · dustingetz · 2024-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It took me a few months of writing Clojure (niche language) to start seeing things in a different light”

endorse · personal · iLemming · 2024-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“LISP doesn't really read well the bigger the codebase, and as something to write software in standalone environment, it makes me a bit hesitant.”

mixed · production · jarjoura · 2024-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure stack traces wrapping Java stack traces wrapping Erlang stack traces in a Kafka consumer... I wish that hell on no one.”

regret · production · red_hare · 2024-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I never used Lisp or Clojure in production, but I learned so much just by trying it out and understanding how it works.”

endorse · personal · edem · 2023-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“have used Clojure in prod (was briefly CTO at FarmLogs... most of our core infra was Clojure) and it's really an amazing language but it requires very senior engineers”

mixed · production · whalesalad · 2023-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I personally find Common Lisp and Clojure much easier to navigate because I can just ignore the filesystem layout”

endorse · personal · fiddlerwoaroof · 2023-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“tracking memory usage and allocations got too hard... But man was it fun, I learned more in a month”

mixed · production · 3 yr · chollida1 · 2023-08-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“When I got started with Clojure (back in 2010)... 136K lines of Clojure”

endorse · production · 13 yr · seancorfield · 2023-04-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“found that similar types of projects were much faster to develop and easier to maintain”

endorse · production · yogthos · 2022-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We love Clojure so we use the Hiccup library to generate HTML.”

endorse · production · silver-arrow · 2022-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I liked the end result of the Clojure version way more than any other. It was objectively shorter and easier to reason about.”

endorse · personal · kgwxd · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we switched to Clojure, and we're doing fine. If I were to start a new company I'd absolutely run it on clojure.”

endorse · production · invalidOrTaken · 2022-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using clojure on all my side project for about 8 years now and I've never had to do what you discuss”

mixed · personal · 8 yr · harperlee · 2020-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I used Clojure (and ClojureScript) in production for several years... the lack of types made even simple data structures an occasional nightmare.”

mixed · production · 3 yr · eyelidlessness · 2020-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It is true that Clojure doesn't have a spec... it is very stable... most code just works after a update (including very big projects).”

endorse · production · m45t3r · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“But, I don't regret Clojure.”

endorse · personal · slgeorge · 2020-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Clojure, and the actual application logic is boring and simple. This is good because it is easy to navigate in code from any project”

endorse · production · m45t3r · 2019-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've used Clojure in production, and I still hate Lisp, any and all of them.”

regret · production · LessDmesg · 2019-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Live hot-reloading means that you really are editing programs as they are running... running a debugger in Clojure is a bit of a mess”

mixed · personal · dwohnitmok · 2019-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure is much faster to develop, and far easier to maintain long term.”

endorse · production · 10 yr · yogthos · 2019-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We ditched Clojure and Clojurescript for NodeJS and JavaScript, for the same reason as it was a huge barrier to entry for new users”

regret · production · zubairq · 2019-06-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I bounce back and forth between TypeScript and Clojure. ... I absolutely love how much thought RH has put into the design of Clojure”

endorse · personal · vga805 · 2019-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We've used Clojure in production for years.”

endorse · production · badsavage · 2018-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Productive on a small scale due to the tooling, interop, libraries, and community being innovative and awesome”

endorse · personal · lopatin · 2018-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“My team has been using Clojure for close to a decade now. We have apps that have been in production for many years”

endorse · production · 9 yr · yogthos · 2018-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been making a living using Clojure for a few years now as a solo dev and I don't feel the language is lacking in anything”

endorse · production · 3 yr · Naomarik · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We've been using a full Clojure stack (front-end + backend) in production for nearly 4 years and very happy with it”

endorse · production · 4 yr · anon1253 · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“for me, the time lost to pinpoint that error is too much. And when I have something in production, I need to be able to pinpoint the error”

mixed · personal · PopsiclePete · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I moved to work with Clojure about 8 years ago, and I don't miss types.”

endorse · production · 8 yr · yogthos · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Yes, it makes you marginally more productive. Yes, our code is marginally safer. And ya, you could probably measure the difference”

mixed · production · didibus · 2018-08-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I moved to work with Clojure about 8 years ago, and I don't miss types.”

endorse · production · 8 yr · yogthos · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure started off fast adding destructuring within 3 versions, but hasn't really done anything cool since then”

regret · personal · _sdegutis · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Anyway, love Clojure still, but in a way it feels like an ongoing dialogue that's over my head”

endorse · personal · thom · 2017-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure since 09 and I don't remember the last time I even had to think about a classpath.”

endorse · personal · 8 yr · dkersten · 2017-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“You won't regret learning Clojure. One of the best things I have ever done for my career.”

endorse · personal · chrisoakman · 2017-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We switched over to Clojure in 2009 and never looked back.”

endorse · production · 8 yr · unit91 · 2017-03-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm using Clojure / Compojure and using a lot of XML generating code for this. I'm happy with the speed of development”

endorse · personal · dizzystar · 2017-02-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“My team has been using Clojure for the past 6 years, and we have the opposite experience.”

endorse · production · 6 yr · yogthos · 2016-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“for now we're only using Clojure to replace C# for game scripting.”

endorse · production · spacepluk · 2016-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“For us, this happens in 150 lines of clojure plus 150 lines of unit tests.”

endorse · production · charlieflowers · 2016-01-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“My biggest complaints with clojure is documentation quality, inconsistency in return types (or just willingness to return nil in error scenarios)”

regret · production · mpdehaan2 · 2015-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we're using Clojure quite successfully in production”

endorse · production · Volundr · 2015-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“a few years ago I added Clojure to the mix and expect it to serve me for over a decade”

endorse · production · 3 yr · pron · 2015-07-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I love living dangerously, if danger means using full-stack Clojure and immutability”

endorse · production · 2 yr · robertstutt · 2015-07-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure for a long time, and it's still been very helpful in updating idioms for modeling domains”

endorse · production · jwhitlark · 2015-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I liked the language a lot. I didn't have the chance to use it in production yet.”

endorse · personal · digaozao · 2015-06-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We've been using Clojure full-time at ReadyForZero for over 3 years now (for web-dev as well as other tasks), and are very happy with our choice.”

endorse · production · 3 yr · bitsai · 2015-06-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure and ClojureScript in production for more than two years now on a web app”

endorse · production · 2 yr · ddellacosta · 2015-06-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've played about with Clojure and it's very nice, too.”

endorse · personal · rjberry · 2014-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We've been using Clojure in production since 2012.”

endorse · production · 2 yr · temochka · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It is a key technology for us, letting us build better analysis tools, faster and more performant than other languages. We have clojure code in production”

endorse · production · lemming · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“letting us build better analysis tools, faster and more performant than other languages.”

endorse · production · cbrozefsky · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Clojure in production to run Database Labs... I couldn't be happier with Clojure for webapps.”

endorse · production · pjlegato · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We're using Clojure at the University Health Network... We started using it about 4 years ago, and now have a number of applications and services written in it.”

endorse · production · 4 yr · yogthos · 2014-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure has been a pleasure to use and the ecosystem has supported all of our needs”

endorse · production · 1 yr · ablancas · 2014-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure handles XML, JSON, and YAML very nicely as well.”

endorse · personal · physicsyogi · 2013-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have just started working on GUI apps with Clojure and the story is much better so far!”

endorse · personal · cmiles74 · 2013-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure for a couple of years now. I got over the () "issue" after a couple of weeks”

endorse · personal · 2 yr · edoloughlin · 2013-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use it at my company, Weft”

endorse · production · speek · 2013-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The whole reason I choose Clojure is because I found myself at almost 30 years and two years into a project”

endorse · personal · VaedaStrike · 2013-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Part of why I like Clojure so much is that when an API or the 'shape' of my problem becomes more clear after the REPL/experimentation stage”

endorse · personal · codewright · 2012-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we use Clojure in commercial projects, quite successfully”

endorse · production · jwr · 2011-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Parentheses wouldn't even crack the Top 5 of my complaints about Clojure (which is, despite some flaws, a great language).”

mixed · personal · michaelochurch · 2011-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I kinda regret having chosen Clojure for my project. Its not that I can't express ideas in very little code”

regret · personal · swah · 2011-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I write them when writing Clojure code.”

endorse · personal · puredanger · 2011-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm learning Clojure these days... Clojure is a good alternative for me”

endorse · personal · eccp · 2011-08-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've written programs in Clojure and quite like it”

endorse · personal · ShardPhoenix · 2010-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“With Clojure, I can build my app into a .JAR, and deploy it on most desktops.”

endorse · production · francoisdevlin · 2010-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've had more eye opening experiences programming in Clojure than in any language I learned before it.”

endorse · personal · rosejn · 2010-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Not many people can say they built a desktop gui with Clojure!”

neutral · production · mtnygard · 2025-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“as someone with several years of professional experience using Clojure, there is seemingly lots of disjoint, moving parts involved”

neutral · production · koito17 · 2023-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“going from PHP, ASP, .NET, RoR, clojure, Python then JavaScript for the longest”

neutral · personal · meiraleal · 2023-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“At work, we started with lein (back in 2011 for our production code), then we switched completely to Boot in 2015”

neutral · production · 12 yr · seancorfield · 2023-02-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using CIDER on emacs to do Clojure development, and I haven't had any issues.”

neutral · personal · quanticle · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“vanilla Clojure on the backend doing SSR of HTML with htmx HTML element attributes”

neutral · production · silver-arrow · 2022-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“At work, we have a codebase of over 142K lines of Clojure, some of which dates back over a decade.”

neutral · production · 10 yr · seancorfield · 2022-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“You end up having to debug obscure JVM errors in production instead of sticking to Clojure.”

neutral · production · iostream23 · 2021-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We have a fairly large codebase (113K lines) in a monorepo with over a dozen artifacts”

neutral · production · seancorfield · 2021-07-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we did try a lot of other backend stacks (Go, PHP, Clojure, Python, ...)”

neutral · personal · cygned · 2021-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure was the main lang we used, but we also worked with python, nodejs, some Go.”

neutral · production · throw20210211 · 2021-02-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we have a few tens of thousands of lines of code in ClojureScript (front end) and Clojure (back end)”

neutral · production · kaliszad · 2020-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure for about 12 years now.”

neutral · personal · 12 yr · jwr · 2020-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“was originally written in Lisp (Clojure) but we switched to Javascript, simply because it was easier to get third party developers on board”

neutral · production · zubairq · 2020-05-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“At Clojure, our best practices including using live REPLs for debugging/troubleshooting”

neutral · production · emidln · 2020-03-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“As someone learning clojure (my first FP) I realized I'm learning it”

neutral · personal · natalyarostova · 2019-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using it for Clojure code locally (though admittedly just for fun, nothing serious).”

neutral · personal · tombert · 2019-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I wrote a copying collector against a KV store in Clojure that I ran in prod for a while, though I swapped it out for a generational mark and sweep in Java.”

neutral · production · reitzensteinm · 2019-07-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure was chosen because it was a modern lisp which was apparently easy to deploy (leveraging the JVM).”

neutral · personal · dtolpin · 2018-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We migrated most of our backend (written in Clojure) from REST to GraphQL”

neutral · production · valw · 2018-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Eventually new stuff got written in Java and we migrated off of it due to the hiring pipeline mostly”

neutral · production · bm1362 · 2018-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure off and on for a few years but skipped learning about macros”

neutral · personal · 3 yr · physicsyogi · 2017-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“a fully AOT, short-running thing we run in house. Here the cost is the set-up of JVM and loading of Clojure stuff”

neutral · production · kimi · 2017-09-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We run java + clojure in Docker and we do it so that we can connect all of the dependencies together with Docker-compose.”

neutral · production · dkersten · 2017-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“after years of Common Lisp and Clojure programming (at hobby level)”

neutral · personal · justinhj · 2016-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I also wrote something little in clojure (wanted to write something in lisp, and clojure presented itself somehow modern).”

neutral · personal · VexorLoophole · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Clojure was the closest I got to replacing Ruby, but now with Elixir it's just such an obvious choice.”

neutral · personal · iagooar · 2016-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've worked in dynamic languages for most of my career (Python, JS, Clojure)”

neutral · production · grayrest · 2016-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“When we switched to Clojure (from nodejs), we decided against any kind of ORM and use HugSQL”

neutral · production · cygned · 2016-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I started my career writing selenium test in clojure”

neutral · production · a-saleh · 2016-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“In our Clojure web app, we started out using MongoDB”

neutral · production · sdegutis · 2015-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have no knowledge about what Circle did during the downtime, but I can talk as a Clojure expert.”

neutral · production · arohner · 2015-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Our Climate Corporation teams are running Clojure.”

neutral · production · ryan_richt · 2015-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Clojure in production systems for 5 years now.”

neutral · production · 5 yr · jwr · 2015-06-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm mostly C/C++/Java/Clojure/Matlab”

neutral · production · pron · 2015-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have written projects in Clojure, including a multiplayer game server.”

neutral · personal · stcredzero · 2015-06-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been coding for over 30 years now (Basic, ASM, C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, JS, Clojure)”

neutral · personal · rivo · 2014-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using paredit with my clojure for a while now”

neutral · personal · retrogradeorbit · 2014-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“As someone that's recently started working with Clojure (and soon ClojureScript)”

neutral · personal · arms · 2014-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Clojure (in production, or almost) at Red Pineapple Media in Berlin, mostly for basic web dev stuff”

neutral · production · loevborg · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have worked in Yousee IT Innovation labs through 3.5 years where we had both clojure and datomic running in production”

neutral · production · 3.5 yr · frankvilhelmsen · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I work for ThoughtWorks and we have a number of client's who use Clojure in production.”

neutral · production · firthh · 2014-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we are using Clojure in production and hopefully soon also Clojurescript.”

neutral · production · jonase · 2014-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I did a number of challenges in Clojure as a learning experience”

neutral · personal · tom_b · 2014-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“There are plugins, which let you script PyCharm with Groovy or Clojure, which I installed”

neutral · personal · klibertp · 2014-09-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm learning Clojure now because the Java ecosystem is important to me”

neutral · personal · pixelmonkey · 2013-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Having learned perl, ruby and python (these are all incredibly similar), and then Clojure, I've found that I really like the functional paradigm.”

neutral · personal · Myk267 · 2013-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we've been using clojure at IOOF (an Australian superannuation company).”

neutral · production · korny · 2013-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I started up with clj and I am trying kinda heavy arbitrage here :)”

neutral · production · terranstyler · 2013-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We're a clojure shop and one of the things I've been working on recently is developing a library for parsing/storing/querying”

neutral · production · jeletonskelly · 2013-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I wrote implementations of the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm in ruby [1] and clojure [2].”

neutral · personal · stevepike · 2013-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I also wrote some macros to use Backbone from Clojure”

neutral · production · Kototama · 2013-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've dabbled in Fortran/PHP/Ruby/Haskell/Scala/Clojure but they become hazy after a while.”

neutral · personal · ww520 · 2012-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“this has led me to Clojure, CL, Haskell and Erlang.”

neutral · personal · biscarch · 2012-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I think the Clojure ecosystem really does need something else web framework-wise.”

neutral · personal · nelsonweiss · 2012-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Clojure at twitter and I believe that google supports CL as part of the after-effects of buying ITA.”

neutral · production · mattknox · 2012-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“this as someone who writes Clojure for a living”

neutral · production · pbiggar · 2012-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Clojure for our startup - we occasionally drop down to Java for some libraries”

neutral · production · pbiggar · 2012-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using the instarepl to learn clojure”

neutral · personal · samspot · 2012-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have been using haskell and clojure in vim for a few months now”

neutral · personal · adrusi · 2011-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“since we are all geeks, here's my Clojure version”

neutral · personal · jrmoran · 2011-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“For the same reason we use Java, C++, Scala, Perl, Closure, Bash, JavaScript, etc...”

neutral · production · linuxhansl · 2011-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've build a couple of clojure and common lisp toy apps, and a few 2D games in common lisp with lispbuilder-sdl”

neutral · personal · pavelludiq · 2011-06-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“A lot of my consulting in the last 9 months has been using Clojure”

neutral · production · 0.75 yr · mark_l_watson · 2010-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I don't feel strong one way or another on this issue, though I do program in Clojure.”

neutral · personal · JoshCole · 2010-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“but with small Clojure and JRuby experiments”

neutral · personal · mark_l_watson · 2010-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been a Lisp weenie for a long time now (Scheme, Common Lisp, recently Clojure both at work and in hobby projects).”

neutral · production · strlen · 2010-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm hoping to rebuild the backend in Clojure, which I am just learning.”

neutral · personal · lkrubner · 2010-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?