Seeing how Clojure is actively used at places like Apple, Amazon, Atlassian, and even Walmart where software development isn't even their primary business, I think it's pretty safe to call it mainstream.
I would call any language that's actively used in the industry with a large and active community mainstream. Restricting the term mainstream to a handful of most used languages is pretty silly in my opinion.
It's just that the community is not large. It's small. To think that 'a few thousand people' is large among millions of other programmers is 'silly' (to quote you).
The last Clojure survey has ~2500 people responding. Which is basically the same for several years now. I we assume that 10 times more people are actively using Clojure, then that would be 25000. Still a lot less than the probably 7 million Java programmers and 8 million Python developers. https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-python-d...
I'm not arguing that Clojure is as widely used as Java or Python, which are two most popular languages in the world. I'm saying that it's a ridiculous bar to set for calling something mainstream.
However, there are some other metrics we can look at. For example, if we look at downloads for popular libraries, we can see that Ring's been downloaded 9,058,741 times, and obviously there are repeat downloads for the same users, but even accounting for that it indicates a much bigger user base than you're suggesting. https://clojars.org/ring/ring-core
Other data points would be commercial tooling like Cursive and commercial funding for projects with organizations like Clojurists Together indicates that there is a critical mass of commercial users who are willing to fund projects
>This says nothing about the number of human users.
It obviously does because people are using these libraries in their projects. As I noted, it's an indirect measure, but it still gives an idea of the usage. And Open Collective was just announced last month, so not sure what point you were trying to make there. Wonder why you didn't mention anything about Clojurists Together, doesn't fit your narrative? https://www.clojuriststogether.org/members/
> It obviously does because people are using these libraries in their projects.
Obviously it says nothing about the number. If we look at the number of downloads of the current version, it's ~40000. Now many systems may download it multiple times. So the number is not an indicator for a large user community.
It 'fits my narrative' well. Just count the number of the members.
Don't get me wrong, that's all fine and useful in a small community, but to claim a handful of companies and a few hundred people is an indicator of a mainstream popularity is just massive overselling and looks 'silly' (to quote you again, sorry).
If commercial usage of the language by companies big and small around the world along with funding of the ecosystem is not an indication of mainstream usage, then I guess we'll have to disagree on what constitutes mainstream.
Right, a few users don't make something mainstream. Big companies have thousands of developers - even non IT companies - that someone inside some big company uses a programming language doesn't make it an indicator for widespread (most people use something -> mainstream) usage.
Mainstream: large relative and absolute numbers of users.
My whole point is that languages like like Js or Java are not a good metric, and you don't have to be as popular as the top handful of languages to be mainstream.
Mainstream is typically taken to be known and widely used which Clojure is. You seem to have a personal much more restrictive definition which only includes the top few languages for reasons unstated.
> Mainstream is typically taken to be known and widely used which Clojure is.
But Clojure is neither widely known nor widely used. The last Clojure survey was done by just 2500 people.
> You seem to have a personal much more restrictive definition which only includes the top few languages for reasons unstated.
The top ten languages are all two orders of magnitude more used than Clojure. They are mainstream. Literally they have millions of users. That's the definition of mainstream. Mainstream pop: the music most people hear and which dominates the charts. No one would claim that free jazz is mainstream, even though it has some stable fan group.
For a language that's not widely known it's weird how Clojure features in Stack Overflow and JVM surveys. Meanwhile, it's also strange that a language that's not widely used finds its ways into all kinds of well known companies.
I'll take your word on that. However, that doesn't change my point that Clojure is used at lost of large companies, and the recent developer survey showed that it's becoming more widely used at large companies.
