Who's using Clojure?

[Damien Lepage]

Hi Everyone,

I'm on a mission: introducing Clojure in my company, which is a big consulting company like many others.

I started talking about Clojure to my manager yesterday.
I was prepared to talk about all the technical benefits and he was interested.
I still have a long way to go but I think that was a good start.

However I need to figure out how to answer to one of his questions: who is using Clojure?

Obviously I know each of you is using Clojure, that makes almost 5,000 people.
I know there is Relevance and Clojure/core.
I read about BackType or FlightCaster using Clojure.

But, let's face it, that doesn't give me a killer answer.

What could help is a list of success stories, a bit like MongoDB published here:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments

Is there a place where I could find this kind of information for Clojure?

Thanks

--
Damien Lepage
http://damienlepage.com

[MiltondSilva]

I think that these (http://clojure.org/funders) companies use clojure.

[Alex Miller]

We're using Clojure at Revelytix (7 people, several projects). Others
not listed yet: Runa, BankSimple, Sonian, Woven.

Some other answers here:
http://www.quora.com/Whos-using-Clojure-in-production
http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-using-Clojure

[Paul deGrandis]

I also know of Clojure being used by Algorithmics, Comcast, and Etsy.
I'm not sure if they are all still deploying Clojure, but they were
all using it at one time or another.

Paul

On Apr 19, 12:04 pm, Alex Miller <a...@puredanger.com> wrote:
> We're using Clojure at Revelytix (7 people, several projects).  Others
> not listed yet: Runa, BankSimple, Sonian, Woven.
>

> Some other answers here:http://www.quora.com/Whos-using-Clojure-in-productionhttp://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-using-Clojure

[Christopher Redinger]

This is a great question!

I've created a home to store the answer to this question.

http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Stories

I would like to seed it with people that are interested in telling their stories there. If you are or know one of the companies that have successfully used Clojure in the wild, I'd love to get a brief summary of the story on that page. Here are the instructions I put there, copied here for your convenience:

As is often the case with young languages, the question has recently been asked of the Clojure Community "Who's using Clojure?"

This is your opportunity to answer!

If you have successfully deployed Clojure code, let the world know.

Send an email with a brief (one paragraph) description of how you've used Clojure to clojure-...@clojure.com. Optionally, send along an image and a link that we can post alongside the description. We'll gather this information post the results here as a one-stop place to send people that want the answer to this question.

I'll update that page as I receive info.

--

Christopher Redinger

http://clojure.com

[Devin Walters]

Two more that haven't been mentioned:

The Deadline: https://the-deadline.appspot.com/login
Wusoup: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/b4d137d963a53cb4?pli=1

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[Sean Allen]

Akamai was at the conj looking to hire clojure programmers so I would
assume they are as well.

[Damien Lepage]

Thanks Everyone for your input and especially to Christopher for creating the community page.
I'm looking forward to read about your success stories there.

2011/4/19 Sean Allen <se...@monkeysnatchbanana.com>

[Justin Balthrop]

We're using Clojure for our graph and search services at http://geni.com

[fyuryu]

Citigroup is using Clojure. In serious projects, not as perl
replacement on some developer's machine.

I'm not at liberty to share more details.

[Christopher Redinger]

We've got a good start to the list going

http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Stories

Any more we should get listed?

[Ken Wesson]

This fractal video claims to have been made using Clojure:

http://vimeo.com/22725635

I stumbled on it earlier today while bored and was quite surprised to
see the word "Clojure" about halfway down the lengthy description
text.

I doubt it was very idiomatic Clojure. The described use,
interpolating between video frames of some sort, would probably
involve a loop/recur full of Java2D and ImageIO interop calls.

Nor does it seem to be a large organization, but an individual hobbyist.

Still, the more Clojure is in the public eye, the better.

[dirtyvagabond]

Factual has been using Clojure for over a year now in narrowly defined
corners of our production stack. Just recently, we've made a decision
to use it more widely. For one thing, Cascalog is starting to be a big
win for us. And we'll most likely be starting up whole new projects
that are mainly Clojure based.

[Sean Corfield]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Christopher Redinger
<redi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've created a home to store the answer to this question.
> http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Stories

...

> If you have successfully deployed Clojure code, let the world know.
> Send an email with a brief (one paragraph) description of how you've used
> Clojure to clojure-...@clojure.com. Optionally, send along an image and
> a link that we can post alongside the description. We'll gather this
> information post the results here as a one-stop place to send people that
> want the answer to this question.

As of one hour ago, World Singles is now (finally) using Clojure in
production as part of our new internet dating platform. I'll send you
a write up for the success stories page once I've cleared it with
management (and after a suitable "burn-in" time on production to make
sure it really is a success story!).
--
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/
World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/
Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://www.getrailo.com/

"Perfection is the enemy of the good."
-- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880)

[Sean Corfield]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Sean Corfield <seanco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As of one hour ago, World Singles is now (finally) using Clojure in
> production as part of our new internet dating platform. I'll send you
> a write up for the success stories page once I've cleared it with
> management (and after a suitable "burn-in" time on production to make
> sure it really is a success story!).

Since a couple of people have asked off-list, I figured I'd provide a
bit more detail about what we're doing with Clojure.

First off, worldsingles.com is the corporate information site and
there's no Clojure there. We have about fifty dating sites and over
the last two years we've completely rebuilt the platform and we're
migrating sites over one at a time (the new platform went live with
one site last September). Currently live on the new platform are:
* vietvibe.com
* latinromantico.com
* deafsinglesmeet.com
* lovingbbw.com
As you can probably tell, our niche is ethnic / specialty dating sites :)

Most of the platform is CFML but we're using Clojure for:
* environment control - auto-configuring the platform based on which
server is hosting
* logging - we're using log4j with a custom appender written in
Clojure (that logs to a database)
* ORM - member profiles (and several other objects in the system) are
all persisted using a simple ORM based on clojure.java.jdbc

The environment control piece determines all sorts of application
settings, including database connections and so on. We had it in CFML
originally but wanted a version we could reuse in Clojure and Scala to
reduce duplication of configuration files and code. It's simple stuff:
a map of default settings and a vector of maps (of settings) for each
server group (as a regex on server name). The app settings var is a
promise that is delivered once the application boots and looks up and
merges settings based on the server name.

The logging piece is very simple right now and uses the ORM to store
matching data to a specific log table. We'll be expanding this to
handle multiple types of data to multiple tables soon and then
switching some of the logging to a noSQL data store (MongoDB most
likely).

The ORM is little more than a wrapper around clojure.java.jdbc but it
handles naming strategies, key generation (for some tables), selecting
which data source connection to use (we write to a master and read
from slaves). The nature of OO in CFML means most of the work is
currently in the CFML wrapper around this layer but we may well move
some of that down into Clojure over time.

Over time we expect to move more and more of our Model layer down into
Clojure. Our Views are fairly complex and tied to CFML so I don't
expect we'll shift the View-Controller portion although as we begin to
expose APIs to the dating platform, we may well use Clojure for those
endpoints. And I've started porting my lightweight
convention-over-configuration MVC framework, FW/1, from CFML to
Clojure as an experiment to see whether full end-to-end Clojure web
development might be a fit for us - the currently available web
frameworks in Clojure don't suit us.

[Jeff Heon]

I'm asked to log in now to access this page.

[vemv]

Surely because Fogus was in process of upgrading it :D

go check it out now! http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Stories

[Simon Holgate]

London Clojurians has a periodic update of who's using Clojure in production.

The latest thread is here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/london-clojurians/ES8AuxXI0Nk

There are a few here that haven't been mentioned elsewhere such as Likely.co, MastodonC, uSwitch, Trampoline, UBS, Deustche Bank. I think I covered them all :)

Simon

[kinleyd]

@Christopher Redinger: Thanks, that's a nice page. Bookmarked and will visit from time to time to assess the state of Clojure adoption.

[Dima Sabanin]

How do we get ourselves to the list? We rely on Clojure heavily at http://beanstalkapp.com and we're working on rewriting even more critical pieces of our infrastructure in Clojure. I tried to edit the page, but it's locked.

--
Best regards,
Dima Sabanin
http://twitter.com/dimasabanin

[Dan Hammer]

We used Clojure and Cascalog to generate the monthly deforestation alerts from satellite imagery for Global Forest Watch.  This is the "real-time" component of the project.

[Hildeberto Mendonça]

Watch this video from Neal Ford ;-) http://youtu.be/2WLgzCkhN2g

I Think it will help.

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[James Reeves]

This is a thread that's four years old. I think it's dead now :)

- James

[Marcus Blankenship]

Have things changed in 4 years?  ;-)

Best,

Marcus

Marcus Blankenship

\\\ Problem Solver, Linear Thinker

\\\ 541.805.2736 \ @justzeros \ skype:marcuscreo

[gvim]

On 04/03/2015 00:55, Marcus Blankenship wrote:
> Have things changed in 4 years? ;-)
>

The leading jobs indicator - indeed.co.uk - shows Clojure adoption
trailing a long way behind the other 2 main JVM languages - Scala and
Groovy. Numbers are exclusive/inclusive of other languages in the job title:

Java: 3,889/4,675
Scala: 231/306
Groovy 24/58
Clojure 6/12

It seems Clojure will probably remain a niche language.

gvim

[gvim]

On 04/03/2015 00:55, Marcus Blankenship wrote:

> Have things changed in 4 years? ;-)
>

Figures in my last post are for London.

gvim

[Sam Ritchie]

Also, check out the success stories:

http://cognitect.com/clojure#successstories

And this list of companies using Clojure:

http://clojure.org/companies

Thanks to Alex Miller for putting this together.

gvim

March 3, 2015 at 6:28 PM

Figures in my last post are for London.

gvim

Marcus Blankenship

March 3, 2015 at 5:55 PM

Have things changed in 4 years?  ;-)

Best,

Marcus

Marcus Blankenship

\\\ Problem Solver, Linear Thinker

\\\ 541.805.2736 \ @justzeros \ skype:marcuscreo

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James Reeves

March 3, 2015 at 5:52 PM

This is a thread that's four years old. I think it's dead now :)

- James

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Hildeberto Mendonça

March 3, 2015 at 1:11 PM

Watch this video from Neal Ford ;-) http://youtu.be/2WLgzCkhN2g

I Think it will help.

--

Hildeberto Mendonça, Ph.D
Blog: http://www.hildeberto.com
Community: http://www.cejug.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/htmfilho

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Dan Hammer

February 27, 2015 at 11:38 AM

We used Clojure and Cascalog to generate the monthly deforestation alerts from satellite imagery for Global Forest Watch.  This is the "real-time" component of the project.

On Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 10:38:14 AM UTC-4, Damien wrote:

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Paddleguru Co-Founder
703.863.8561
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Twitter // Facebook

[Michael Richards]

I'm about to start training 4 devs on my team at Oracle in Clojure.  My manager is very nervous about putting Clojure into the product.  I'm forging on regardless :)  I rewrote some components of our product in Clojure in my spare time, mainly as a proof of concept that we could do some of our analytics in the streaming model rather than in the data warehousing model.  As sometimes happens, the POC was so simple and fast that the team is now interested in productizing it.

In our last 1-1 meeting, my manager told me he had searched LinkedIn for Clojure and "only" got 9000 matches.   Whereas his search for Java turned up 80 million or some such.  My rebuttal is that those are the 9000 smartest developers, so you should be trying to recruit them.

--mike

[Alan Moore]

The question of "using" may have different meanings depending on your definition - if you include "using" libraries or frameworks built with Clojure (partly or in whole) you could include all the companies who deploy, for example, Apache Storm or use some of Puppet Labs' tools.

The consultancy ThoughtWorks has put Clojure on their radar - several Clojure and ClojureScript libraries are also listed (Core Async, Om, Reagent.) I can't vouch for the consultancy itself but I think it is telling that Clojure has a number of technologies listed there.

Given the fact that, as a hosted language, Clojure is very different than say, Go or Erlang, where the language ecosystem (runtimes, libraries, etc.) is entirely dependent on the language's popularity in order for it to expand into new environments and remain viable. Given that Java (and the JVM), CLR, and Javascript effectively boost Clojure into new contexts for (mostly) free it can play nice along with existing languages and their momentum. See also: React Native.

Additionally, consider that ClojureScript and Om have strongly influenced the React community w.r.t. immutability, I'd say that counts as a big win for Clojure.

IMHO, job boards are effectively looking backwards in time. It isn't the place to look if you are trying new things or being innovative. Sure, if you want to hire some easily replaceable "tool" go for Java... what could possibly go wrong? :-)

Alan

[Rangel Spasov]

Haha this is the funniest thing I've read in a while! Good luck, forge on! :)

On Thursday, March 5, 2015 at 7:47:41 AM UTC-8, Michael Richards wrote:

[Daniel Kersten]

Regarding hiring, it seems to me that most of the smaller companies aren't hiring clojure developers but rather training other developers.

I know one local former java shop that now mostly uses clojure for new development and non of their team of ~10 had any prior clojure experience. In my own startup I'm one of only two developers and the other guy had no prior clojure experience but picked it up in a matter of weeks.

To add to the "who's using clojure" conversation: I know three companies here (Dublin, Ireland) who are using Clojure heavily (and one or two more US companies who use it who have operations here but I think they're already mentioned on the lists here).

[Fergal Byrne]

Hey Dan & Michael,

I'd add this talk [1] to Neal's great talk as a cautionary tale before trying to force things on nervous managers. Remember that a manager's #1 priority is keeping his own job, and being the guy who green-lighted an experiment will get you fired (or at least sidelined) if the initiative fails and you can be blamed. Back in the '80's, people said "no one ever got fired for hiring IBM".

As mentioned in this talk, you should get to work using Clojure on non-production code, maybe on some tool which is creating problems for your team. Demonstrate how replacing pieces or all of the crusty Java/Scala/Ruby codebase with clean and crisp Clojure is a no-brainer for this task. If it doesn't work, don't say anything about that and move on to another mini-project.

On the jobs question, Daniel (from here in Dublin) is correct. The main reason you don't see any jobs is because that would indicate the hiring company has already switched production projects to Clojure (by training existing devs), and very few have done this yet (for the reasons stated above). Clojure houses like Juxt and Cognitect are all hiring, but often rely on personal networks rather than broadcasting on job sites. There are a couple of sites like functionaljobs [2] for companies without good personal networks.

Clojure is winning one dev at a time. There are almost no cases of teams switching back to Java or Scala once they've worked with Clojure for a while. The same cannot be said for Groovy or Scala, which are being abandoned in good numbers. 

Regards,

Fergal

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWKf3ROVgrY

[2] http://functionaljobs.com/

--

Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT

http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology

http://ie.linkedin.com/in/fergbyrne/ - https://github.com/fergalbyrne

Founder of Clortex: HTM in Clojure - https://github.com/nupic-community/clortex

Author, Real Machine Intelligence with Clortex and NuPIC 

Read for free or buy the book at https://leanpub.com/realsmartmachines

Speaking on Clortex and HTM/CLA at euroClojure Krakow, June 2014: http://euroclojure.com/2014/

and at LambdaJam Chicago, July 2014: http://www.lambdajam.com

e:fergalby...@gmail.com t:+353 83 4214179

Join the quest for Machine Intelligence at http://numenta.org

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[Alex Miller]

I can confirm that there are a lot of companies training existing devs in Clojure. I pretty regularly conduct training classes (for Cognitect) at companies in this position, usually for 15-25 devs. Most commonly those devs are coming from Java or Ruby. Some of those are well-known Clojure companies but many are not.

I don't track any numbers on it but anecdotally I am seeing a lot more Clojure job ads this year than last.

Alex

[gvim]

On 06/03/2015 10:46, Fergal Byrne wrote:
>
> Clojure is winning one dev at a time. There are almost no cases of teams
> switching back to Java or Scala once they've worked with Clojure for a
> while. The same cannot be said for Groovy or Scala, which are being
> abandoned in good numbers.
>

What's your source evidence for these assertions?

gvim

[Matt Owen]

We're using Clojure at Chartbeat.

[Alex Miller]

I added you to http://clojure.org/companies.

[Mike Rodriguez]

We've been using Clojure at Cerner in the healthcare IT space.

[Eric Richmond]

We're using Clojure in production @ Indaba Music to power conversesamplelibrary.com

-Eric