The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that Clojure is not a practical, get-shit-done language.
For obvious reasons (syntax) Clojure gets lumped in with the other lisps but Clojure is really intensely practical. It makes a number of choices to that effect. The most of important of which is being a JVM language, so you get access to basically all Java code ever written. The builtin collections are very high quality. It's incredibly stable, so the code you write just keeps working regardless of whatever new features they add in the newest version of the language. There are a lot of high-quality libraries that are "done". The immutable-by-default thing makes writing concurrent code much, much easier. Being on the JVM means you don't have to fuss around with cross-compilation. It's fast enough that you rarely need to mess with optimizing it until you reach real scale. I could go on.
I don't even do much Clojure anymore, but when I did, it was hands down the best thing I ever used for work where the main tasks involved moving lots of data around, filtering it, reducing it, etc. Of course Clojure does tend to attract a lot of clever people, but it also attracts a lot of people looking for the tool with the most leverage to get their work done. There is a lot of Clojure out there, just quietly running the back offices of small/medium sized businesses.
For obvious reasons (syntax) Clojure gets lumped in with the other lisps but Clojure is really intensely practical. It makes a number of choices to that effect. The most of important of which is being a JVM language, so you get access to basically all Java code ever written. The builtin collections are very high quality. It's incredibly stable, so the code you write just keeps working regardless of whatever new features they add in the newest version of the language. There are a lot of high-quality libraries that are "done". The immutable-by-default thing makes writing concurrent code much, much easier. Being on the JVM means you don't have to fuss around with cross-compilation. It's fast enough that you rarely need to mess with optimizing it until you reach real scale. I could go on.
I don't even do much Clojure anymore, but when I did, it was hands down the best thing I ever used for work where the main tasks involved moving lots of data around, filtering it, reducing it, etc. Of course Clojure does tend to attract a lot of clever people, but it also attracts a lot of people looking for the tool with the most leverage to get their work done. There is a lot of Clojure out there, just quietly running the back offices of small/medium sized businesses.