Clojure devs are all about Java 8 and functional programming

Clojure’s annual community review is in! The 2019 survey is a good overview of the Clojure ecosystem, taking a look at its users and how the community uses Clojure in their daily lives.

Clojure has polled its user base on a mostly-annual basis since 2010. This year’s survey reached 2461 respondents. Questions this year focused on things like the various strengths of this functional programming language, where developers deploy their code, and what kind of organizations use Clojure.

All in all, the survey shows that Clojure developers are using it at work even more at larger organizations. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers.

Steady adoption rates for everything but Java 9

The vast majority of developers utilize Clojure (97%), with ClojureScript coming in second (64%) and ClojureCLR at a very distant third (2%).

Clojure 1.10 arrived late last year with improved error reporting and Java compatibility. In the two months since it released, over 50% of developers have adopted it! That’s a pretty impressive adoption rate. Roughly 60% of developers are still using 1.9 and a further 23% are still on 1.8. These adoption rates are slightly worse thanlast year’s, but still fairly respectable.

However, these speedy adoption rates only apply to Clojure.

This year’s survey shows that Clojure developers are still overwhelmingly targeting Java 8. (Someone should warn them that Java 8 has already passed its publicly supported end of life date !) Poor Java 9 is fairly unloved at 16%; more attention is given to Java 10 (20%) and Java 11 (31%).

The failed adoption of Java 9 is certainly not a good sign for either language. However, it’s good to see developers are slowly moving towards newer JDKs. After all, targeting older versions is how we get awful security breaches. I’d be curious to see the breakdown of those developers who still target Java 8: is this for work or for hobby coding?

SEE MORE: Top 5 IDEs and text editors for Clojure

The community at large

So, when looking at the Clojure community, a few things pop out from the data.

Clojure’s share has remained relatively the same for where developers use it. Clojure continues to be a bit of a hobby language, with over 75% of respondents saying that they use it for serious and fun tinkering.

That said, developers consistently appreciate Clojure’s idiomatic support for functional programming and immutable data. Other positives include things like interactive REPL, ease of development, and the community.

This year’s survey also included a question about how long people had been programming professionally. 1 in 10 Clojure users have over 20+ years of developing experience; 49% had over 10+ years of experience. In comparison, only 42% of JVM developers have that much programming experience.

So, what are devs using Clojure for? Web development (80%), mostly. Open source projects (47%), building and delivering commercial services (31%), and enterprise apps (20%) round out the top uses. However, same as last year, there’s an awful lot of interesting use cases at the margins, like IoT, music, graphics, and games.

This year, there’s a general increase of developers working in larger companies. The audience for Clojure projects has changed as well, moving from “in team” to more “outside team” or “outside the organization”.

Same as last year, we can also see what industries everyone is in. FinTech (16%) jumped to the front this year, followed by enterprise services (15%), consumer software (12%), retail (9%), and media and advertising (6%). Agriculture continues to hang on at the bottom, with 15 respondents using Clojure in the farms and fields.

SEE MORE: Clojure and Scala are less bug-prone, Python induces more defects, study shows

Closing thoughts

If you’re interested in the full results, you can view them here . The results from previous years are also available online  here . And, of course, if you’d like to try out Clojure you should head on over to their  website  or  GitHub page .