> Smile 3.x is GPL-licensed, which poses some potential conflicts for some end users...The community consensus is converging around moving away from Smile due to the GPL-relicensing issue, focusing instead on Tribuo...

(tribuo is developed by oracle)

It's a really great thing that the java community has a high performance and well accepted (~5x stars than tribuo) ML package that's GPL. CF python where the top two libraries are developed by google and facebook. The GPL protects individual, independent developers.

I don't think it's right to recommend that new users move away from the package because of licensing issues; the fact that it's GPL now is a good thing for everyone except corporate users (probably a great part of readers). The people who might have GPL problems already know themselves when they'll have a problem.

*https://clerk.vision/

I really like the package manager, I like that there’s an IDE with a visual step debugger (seriously, why do almost no lisp people value this?), that it’s multi paradigm, and that the language continues to improve and evolve.

Clojure just has so many finicky or annoying things about it. The design of deps.edn/clojure CLI and the lack of user friendly tooling is forever frustrating. Laziness and its implications being invisibly core to the language is annoying as well.

I'm grateful that I get to benefit from these community efforts.

But is it just me or has it gotten awfully quiet around Clojure? I mean, it is of course expected that no novelty can stay in the lime light forever. But what has become of all of the excitement?

My impression is that Clojure failed to live up to the hype, but has found its niche - but it is a rather small niche. In the end, despite its attempts to differentiate itself from Lisp pitfalls, it has gone the way of all Lisps: it's this cool, intellectually stimulating language that in practice almost nobody uses.

Is that view wrong? Please feel free to correct me, and sorry if this post is about Clojure in general and not specifically about its machine learning ecosystem.

1) The language evolving all the time is an anti-feature. Clojure is an oasis for the people who are tired of having their knowledge obsoleted by constant change that doesn't really improve anything. People can build whatever weird and wonderful features they want using macros in their own library.

2) deps/edn - the design seems to support toolmakers more than end users. I hated it myself (tinged by poor documentation at the time which has since been remedied). But for anyone else having similar issues; the answer is to jump to leiningen [0] which is by far an easier way to set up a Clojure project.

Deps is ok, but lein is what I'd recommend to anyone as a starting point.

[0] https://leiningen.org/

We also have a debugger in Emacs/CIDER.

Your other complaints read like you haven't dug really far, or they are outdated.

The “do-it-yourself” mentality that is at the core of Clojure dev culture results in a less rich library ecosystem. Not only you often end up writing custom code for a generic feature, the rest of your team cannot reuse their past experience but has to learn your custom code and maintain it.

* https://gleam.run/

"user friendly tooling" and ANY Scheme in the same sentence?!

I kid, but I always have held that Schemes feel like "tools for building a programming language" (the insanity that is (car ), (cdr ), (caadadr ) suddenly reveals its usefulness when you write an s-expression parser) and Clojure feels like "an actual programming language" with its benevolent use of brackets, build tools, and library ecosystem.

    (defn my-func [arg0 arg1] ..)    -- Clojure
    (define (my-func arg0 arg1) ..)  -- Scheme (of which Racket is one)

One thing I've always liked about Racket is its refusal to accept (if )s without else statements, insisting instead on using (when )s.

We do, that is why Cursive exists.

The problem are the folks educated in SBCL + Emacs that never used anything else Lisp related, including the survivors of the Lisp hype wave like Lisp Works and Allegro Common Lisp.

My last few jobs were in clojure so jobs do exist, moreso than in Common Lisp and Haskell at least (probably). There aren't very many companies that use it relative to the programming world at large, so I'd say you're right on that front.

I'm happy using it and will continue using it. Sometimes I encounter interesting ideas and libraries that I end up using.

At the end of the day, it's a programming language. You can write interesting things on uninteresting or even subjectively awful languages and boring things on interesting languages.

Here's something I've been working on for the last two weeks: https://keyboards.justbuythisthing.com/. If I didn't tell you I wrote it in clojure, no one would know. It could very well be PHP.

The problem is that an entire ecosystem is more than just a new language. Clojure has some really interesting libraries, but the rest relies on Java. It is a good ecosystem nonetheless. Julia is having the same issue. It has grown a very respectable ecosystem, but it is hard to grow further to catch up with Python in some fronts without massive corporate funding.

It is interesting to note that, at some point circa 2010, it looked like Clojure could revive Lisp-Stat with Incanter. But, eventually, the project declined in popularity and died. Reaching mainstream relies on getting a critical mass of developers at the right time and for the right domain.

The language ecosystem reflects the smaller numbers of contributors.

I would like to learn it and probably would like to work with it. Only downsides I see is reliance on JVM (which is also a strength) and not as good ways of recursion as other Lisps or Schemes (simply call the function, duh, because it just works and doesn't need extra keywords or syntax).

But I liked the talks and that is seems to have the functional datastructured one needs, if one wants to avoid mutation.

The ideas behind Clojure (functional, immutable datastructures, homoiconic syntax, focus on simplicity, JVM interop) still stand strong IMO.

There are still some exciting projects done in Clojure: Electric Clojure and Rama come to mind.

It also seems Rich Hickey kind of stopped doing interesting talks, and some big bank bought into it and no one really likes banks.