Go vs. Clojure – Which has the better job outlook?

1 points by babygetoboy 9 years ago | 4 comments

Trying to decide which language to deep dive in and a big factor is which one would I more likely be able to use at work.

pankajdoharey 9 years ago |

I can tell you with my experience that the answer that you are looking for has more to do with your own feeling than the actual job prospects so i would go ahead and tell you what you are actually looking for. If you are a person who likes systems development or want to write in a c like language with minimal cognitive overhead compared to Ruby, Java, C++ then Go is an excellent language. It has its quirks but none as bad as those mentioned above. Clojure on the other hand is a different kind of language it is deep and beautiful, like Go, you can learn it a matter of days of-course it would take a yr/yrs to master it. But for all practical purposes clojure is the simplest language to learn. It has almost no syntax. It is immensely deep and powerful and give you a deep sense of satisfaction after programming. Initially you would feel stupid programming in it but slowly it would become your strength and you will feel like a smug of clojure. That is just the nature of the language. At the end all you need is just one job, which you can find in any language, hell a friend of mine is still programming mainframes in IBM Cobol in 2017. So you need to decide what you want and how you want to feel. Finding a job is secondary to the exercise and there are plenty of jobs in both the languages.

andreasgonewild 9 years ago |

Depends a lot on what type of companies you want to work for, but I would say that Go is definitely more popular overall. Popular is unfortunately mostly crap, which is why it sucks as a long term optimization target.

freedomben 9 years ago |

Go definitely has a better job outlook for hiring. If you're wanting to sell it to current management/coworkers, my experience so far has also been that management is a lot more receptive to Go than Clojure.

kimi 9 years ago |

Go is more "mainstream" (I'd say it's totally mainstream by now) while Clojure is still "niche" - and being a Lisp, I doubt it will ever be non-niche.