Why Clojure?

A February 2025 Hacker News discussion of a "Why Clojure?" essay generated over 200 comments debating the language's production viability. Practitioners reported 10+ year codebases with minimal dependency churn and cited REPL-driven development as enabling faster iteration than compile-test-debug cycles. Critics raised hiring difficulties, dynamic typing friction in large codebases, and community fragmentation around tooling (lein vs deps.edn vs boot). Multiple commenters noted teams initially adopting Clojure for greenfield projects, then migrating to Go or Kotlin after key developers departed, attributing abandonment to perceived elitism and tooling complexity rather than technical deficiencies.