There are always a few outliers for any language but when you look at a larger sample Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable. Take contract roles on IT Jobswatch, for example. 12 conracts in the last 6 months in the whole of London and 1 in the rest of the UK compared with Scala for which there were 279 in London and 128 in the rest of the UK. I'm not a Scala fanboy either. I remember back in 2013 when Clojure was hot and Clojure meetups in London were well-attended. Those days are over. London Clojurians has struggled to attract a handful of attendees since long before the COVID19 crisis.
> Clojure's failure to gain adoption is undeniable
What... are.. you.. talking... about? Do some googling around. Clojure today is the most popular in its category of the languages with strong FP emphasis and slowly and steadily growing. It has already generated more jobs, books, active podcasts, conferences. More than Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elm, Purescript, Erlang, Elixir, Idris, Julia, and has recently surpassed Scala and become 3rd most used JVM language after Java and Kotlin.
Of course, one can say: "actually, none of these have gained much adoption in the industry", and speaking in relative numbers, they'd be right. But those who can no longer bear the pain of writing awful, deeply nested Java class hierarchies or tired of debugging concurrency issues would always find projects to write and sometimes even get paid for, using their preferred tool.
I honestly don't understand people, when they say: "It's really nice, I love it, but I'm getting paid to use something else." Well, do you really expect someone to call you and say: "Hey, I saw your comment on HN, it seems you'd love to use Clojure, can we offer you a lot of money?", or something like that?
I for one, after only a week of playing with Clojure, immediately quit my job. It took me just a few days to find a Clojure gig. I switched jobs three times since then, never (even during the COVID-19 crisis, when I was laid off) was a question for me "Is the fun over? Do I have to start looking for Python jobs now?" Luck of course is a factor, but you have to herd, guide and push your luck forward. It's no one's fault that you are forced to use something you don't like.
"... recently surpassed Scala and become 3rd most used JVM language". If we're talking about real, paid jobs then you're not addressing the statistics I quoted. Scala adoption is an order of magnitude higher than Clojure. I'm not talking popularity amongst developers - just real paying jobs which can be relied on to put food on the table and pay mortgages. Sun and Oracle's marketing of Java in the late 90s/early 2000s is a juggernaut compared with which an individual's luck in finding a Clojure job pales into insignificance so, yes, they are responsible/at fault for Java's dominance of paid programming work.
