Someone asked on Reddit: Why Clojure is not widely adopted like mainstream languages?

Here's my answer:

You probably should have flipped the question, because the vast majority of programming languages are not mainstream.

The more insightful question is: "Why and how did a language X become mainstream?"

From the answers …

JSON is arguably the world's most popular human readable data format today.  It has largely replaced XML as the data exchange format on the Internet. One of the key reasons for the proliferation of JSON is its simplicity.  The data structure are very limited: only arrays, enclosed with []; and objects …

Clojure has been my primary programming language for a couple of years now. During this period, I have relied on my trusty Vim text editor as the development environment. Coding Clojure in Vim had been an enjoyable experience with these excellent Vim plugins:

1. vim-clojure-static
2. fireplace.vim
3. paredit.vim
4. Rainbow Parentheses …

As previously mentioned, I am learning category theory, beginning with Lawvere's Conceptual Mathematics book. This is a very elementry book that assumes almost nothing as a background. However, it is still a math book, which requires doing some exercises. Since the book provides no answer to exercises, I decide …

My colleague has highly recommended to me the following CSV reader/writer: https://supercsv.sourceforge.net/

I am yet to test it out, so I will need to come back provide my review. But just put a pointer here, since this tool is not realy easy to find without the …

Finally done with all the 100 problems listed on 4clojure.com so far :-). When new problems appears there, I will probably do them when I have some time to kill, but I will not post my solutions here any more. If I found interesting programming exercises, I may submit to …

This post continues the previous one, on my solutions for small clojure programming problems on 4clojure.com. Doing these problems seems to be addictive as I could not seem to stop myself. The site recently added a golf league feature, so one can see how short one's own solution compared …

For someone without previous Lisp experience, the hardest part of learning Clojure programming seems to be the functional way of doing things. It is like math, one really needs to do some exercises in order to master it. At this point, 4clojure.com seems to be the best place for …

I recently started to learn clojure programming. It is an interesting experience. Ever since I learned computer programming almost 20 years ago, in Pascal, on a VAX minicomputer terminal, I have not experienced this newbie sensation with a computer language. The sense of excitement and novelty is high, and the …

I hate xml configuation files. They look awful. As a result, they can be very time-consuming to write, and are very error-prone. There's no type-safty checking whatsoever. I would rather keep configurations within my Java source code. After all, we programmers are the only people looking at these configurations, why …

Modularized software system design is often a good idea. Maven is the new software build system that is purported to be better than ant. For my new project, I want to create a maven build consisting of multiple modules. To do this, and let Eclipse treats these modules as parts …

I am writing a Java program to run psychology experiments. Since this is a generic program that may be configured for running some reaction time (RT) experiments, I am worried about the time resolution of Java. It turns out that I don't need to worry too much, except on Windows …

The task is fairly simply --- I need to load the content of some text files into DB2. There are many ways to do so, but since I only need to this only once (hopefully), I want to find an easy way without writing any external code.

So here is the …

These day I write Java programs on my local machine and then move them to a Linux server to run experiments. This routine works fine so far. However, when I ran one of the progams, which involves coping one file from one directory to another, I kept on the following …

I have been using Borland programming environment since 1994, beginning with its Turbo C 2.0, then Borland C++, and now JBuilder. This company has always produced programmer friendly products. Comparing with other products, Borland's offering are always the most natural, and the easiest to get the job done. At …