I have been working with Clojure for 5+ years now. For CLI applications babashka has worked quite well for us.
Would love to know more about the problems you faced.
In my experience whenever I faced such issues - it has been because I am not using it well.
For CLOS kind of things I have found https://github.com/camsaul/methodical library quite well and the performance is better than default multimethods in core clojure implementation.
Small correction: finding experienced people is difficult. There's no shortage of engineers who only briefly tried Clojure and would love to use it at their full-time gig.
Collecting knowledge of various technologies-of-the-now isn't really a point of pride in the field, unless you're aggressively doing résumé driven development, which is a short term win, long term lose strategy.
But yeah, I'm glad you've come to see that. And yes, just use Postgres. As I like to put it, unless you have a really good reason not to use an RDBMS, use an RDBMS. But we're living in an era where bootcamp grads come out knowing only JavaScript, and MongoDB lets you make queries that resemble JavaScript, so it becomes that thing of "real professionals choose technologies for which there is a large talent pool".
We started working on it full time around 1.5 years ago.
2 years if you count when I exploring building it in other languages.
Alongside building Vade Studio:
I have been working as a contractor for 2 clients. Developing systems for them
Other two developers have been managing their college curriculum as well.
I am not sure how to do the math around it, but anecdotally I don't think this would be possible in any other environment.
> I don't think this would be possible in any other environment.
A few years ago, I worked in a small group (6 devs) for a retail business. We had all sorts of different third-party integrations - from payment processors to coupon management and Google Vision (so people wouldn't upload child porn or some other shit through our web and mobile apps). The requirements would constantly change - our management would be like: "Hey guys, we want this new program to launch, can we do it next week?", then a day later: "Turns out we can't do it in the state of Tennessee, let's add some exceptions, okay?", then some time later: "Folks, we really want to A/B test this but only for a specific class of customers..." Jesus, and it wasn't just an "occasional state of affairs" every once in a while; it was a constant, everyday, business-as-usual flow. We had to quickly adapt, and we had to deploy continuously. We had several services, multiple apps - internal, public, web and mobile, tons of unit and E2E tests, one legacy service in Ruby, we had Terraform, containers, API Gate, load balancers, etc.
I can't speak for myself, but a couple of my peers were super knowledgeable. They used all sorts of tools and languages before. I remember my team-lead showing me some Idris features (tbh, I don't even remember anymore exactly what) and asking my opinion if we should find a way to implement something like that, and I couldn't hide my confusion as I didn't know nothing about Idris.
Numerous times, we had discussions on improving our practices, minimizing tech debt, etc. And I remember distinctly - many times we have speculated how things would've turned out if we used some other stack, something that's not Clojure. We would explore various scenarios, we even had some prototypes build in Golang, Swift and Kotlin. And every single time, we found compelling and practical reasons for why Clojure indeed was the right choice for the job.
Sure, if we had a larger team, maybe we could've done it using a different stack. But it was a startup, and we had just the six of us.
