Worried about types + Clojure Elitism

In October 2017, a thread on ClojureVerse questioned whether Clojure's appeal skewing toward "grumpy old programmers" reflected an outreach issue, noting the low number of beginners showing up at conferences after a decade of availability. Much of the discussion centered on tooling friction, especially the complexity of getting a usable IDE setup, typically involving IntelliJ with Cursive or a nontrivial Emacs configuration. One newcomer described spending days just getting builds working, in contrast to other languages that were usable within minutes.

The thread also touched on whether ClojureScript was mature enough to warrant more active outreach to JavaScript developers. At the time, platforms like Egghead.io offered extensive React and Elm material, but no ClojureScript courses, reinforcing its relative invisibility.