I miss Clojure

I used to write Clojure for my day job. I worked on a contract for about 8 or 9 months where I had the pleasure of working in ClojureScript daily, both for building an API (yes, instead of using Clojure and the JVM) and for building a mobile app (this was well before shadow-cljs).

There were a lot of bumps along the way, and several strange bugs (I recall working with controlled inputs in re-frame on mobile to be particularly nasty), and yet it was one of the most delightful environments to be in. I was also using Emacs at the time, too. Paired with Clojure, I was working in the land of lisps. I loved the ability to evaluate code in a buffer and see the results pointed at by a nifty little ASCII arrow =>. In retrospect, this was the most niche set of tools I've ever used in my career. I'm glad for it not just for the sheer fun of writing Clojure code, but how much it taught about debugging my tools (for better or for worse).

Going to Clojure meetups and working with folks writing Clojure definitely changed my understanding of programming fundamentally—Lisps are known to do this. But as important (if not more important) as the tools were the people I had the pleasure of meeting and working with. It's unfair of me to pigeon-hole a group of people based on their programming preferences, but I'm going to do that anyway—the folks I met who wrote Clojure were the most interesting programmers I've met—not just in their approachces to programming, but even their personal lives, as I got to know them.

The folks I met writing and reading Clojure were often the smartest people in the room. Whether by chance, luck, or circumstance—they were. I felt like I understood a fraction of what they did, but they were welcoming and happy to share their knowledge, even if I didn't understanding everything on the first pass.

These days, if I'm working on any kind of full-stack project on my own, I almost always reach for Elixir and Phoenix. It has enough elements of Clojure but saves you the need to bolt together your web stack via a series of libraries. It is a powerful set of tools in its own right, and has its own unique communities, too. I like it a lot. I've read that Elixir took a lot of inspiration from Clojure. I can see that. But I haven't yet had the joy of meeting many folks doing Elixir, and seeing their passion (I know they're out there). I know that some of the things I'm sharing here are sentiments that others have felt in other programming languages—whether Go, Ruby, Rust, etc. It just happened, that for me, at the right time in my career and my personal life, it was Clojure.

This post's title is true, I do miss Clojure. But I think I miss the people who used it, who got together to chat, share knowledge, and hangout more.