Download stats mean nothing. The truth about Clojure adoption can be found by typing "title:Clojure" into Indeed.com. Search for United Kingdom and you'll find 4 Clojure jobs, 3 of which are in London.
Using "title:" you meaninglessly narrowed your search. There are postings like "Software engineer" with body saying "Developing with JS, and Clojure" which won't appear in your results.
Number of "Clojure" results is 109, compared with 98 for "Haskell", for instance (in London, according to indeed.co.uk). So both are not scoring big, certainly, but those numbers are nevertheless better than 3-4 years ago.
In my experience (in Sweden), most of those results are "false positives". Companies/recruiters like to look for passionate programmers, so they put smaller languages like Clojure in their ads, even though the job itself has nothing to do with it.
True, except they don't include languages just for being smaller (we don't see Befunge, or Unlambda there), but those associated with smartness, and passion for learning. In context of the discussion (dead/alive state), I wouldn't count this as a bad thing. There's no arguing that finding FP job is hundreds (or thousands, depending on city/country) times harder than OOP job. It doesn't mean all functional langs are dead.
I agree with what you're saying, my post was mainly trying to point out that there might appear to be more Clojure jobs than there actually are. For the past couple of months, I've been looking for Clojure jobs (after my company in one fell swoop decided that Clojure was out, and we were no longer allowed to use it for new projects), and though there are quite a few matches when searching just for "Clojure" on job boards, most of those have nothing to do with Clojure. Out of 50-100 matches, maybe 2-4 of those were actual Clojure jobs. Granted, this is in Stockholm, but the situation was pretty much the same a couple of years ago, and things don't seem to have improved. I love Clojure, it's probably my favorite programming language, but I finally decided on a more normal C#/Java/JS position for my new job.
Well, I have already agreed FP jobs aren't plenty :-) Business executives mostly prefer to stick to beaten paths, and it's understandable. I just don't see a tragedy here. OCaml was born in 1996, if I'm not mistaken, so it's a decade older than Clojure. Despite never reaching the industry mainstream, it never stopped being developed, it is used in real projects, so I guess we can agree it's very much alive. Clojure in my very subjective opinion is doing a bit better than that due to ability to augment software written in Java. So while I don't believe it will conquer the world anytime soon, I also believe it's not going to disappear anytime soon.
>Clojure in my very subjective opinion is doing a bit better than that due to ability to augment software written in Java.
OCaml can embed or be embedded in native applications, but that's not the point.
I think that the main problem with Clojure is the lack of types.
Just look at how much Scala is more popular than Clojure, although it's also a strange functional language derived from OCaml/SML.
There is a common opinion that types are a necessity, even ruby, racket and python are adding them. Clojure people are just trying to substitute types with a runtime evaluated contracts/Hoare triplets, which is not an adequate substitution.
What had kept happening was that services written by my team (mostly doing Clojure for backend development) were taken over by other teams that either weren't interested in learning Clojure, or weren't allowed by management to do Clojure development (for whatever reason), so each time this happened our original service would be rewritten in Java or Node.
...of course, for the other team to be able to do this, they still needed to learn some Clojure in order to understand our code, but even in the cases where they actually liked doing Clojure, they were still forced to do the rewrite. The company was/is expanding very rapidly, so part of me can understand the decision to narrow it down to fewer "allowed" languages, to allow services/responsibilities/teams to move around more freely.
But it was one of the main reasons I decided to leave the company. I had joined after years hoping for Clojure to be my main professional programming language (for a substantial part of my career, at least), and I left a somewhat more bitter developer, but at the same time feeling a bit more free and relaxed - there are sooo many opportunities to pick from, now what I'm a bit more open when it comes to the tech!
