Surprised to see Clojure/ClojureScript come up on socials more often all of a sudden. I used it professionally for a few years around ~2012 and like many others moved off JVM and moved into typed [functional] languages.
Is the sudden buzz due to agentic coding? Does it rip through code faster with no type checking and fewer invalid syntax errors and reserved keywords to deal with? are we in for a sexp resurgence?
Personally I moved from typed functional languages to Clojurescript and then Clojure around 10 years ago
Most serious Clojure code bases I'm aware of invest heavily in their test suite so yes you can just add a skill to your AI that tells it the most effective way to use your test suite then send it to the races
Some of my colleagues let the agent interact with the REPL and they report faster performance because the agent is not paying the start up cost on every interaction, personally I've been lazy there its fast enough for me
As you've hinted at Clojure does have less bits that get in the way, everything is true except false and nil, the language does not have order precedence table the core language supports immutable and persistent data structures as default
Everything is an expression nothing is a mixture of operators and expressions map, reduce, filter are built in and expected in normal code
Code you wrote 10 years ago in Clojure will likely still work today the ecosystem and language authors treat breaking code as taboo
Of all the languages I've used its the least headache inducing and the most freeing in terms of expressing my ideas
Also the defacto reverse debugger Flowstorm is a programming dream
Its a lovely language if you want to be content
The flip side of that is most users take it for granted and don't talk about it much
There are also a lot of commercial Clojure programmers who do not understand the language and as a result not that happy, they often didn't willing choose it, probably not ready for it, I think most Clojurians should have gone through a decade of noticing things in their other languages they didn't like before using it
Rich Hickey the creator of Clojure does famously influential videos on software but that doesn't mean your colleagues have watched them or care
Been coding in lots of languages with agentic coding and it performs much better with typed languages since it basically corrects the agent if it does any hallucination errors. Especially during major refactorings. I have been dealing with large untyped python code bases and it sucks with AI since if it's not covered with tests it's such a teadious job to make sure it did not break anything. The stronger the type system the better it is. Also AI model is trained on code and the more popular the language is the better the AI will be at it. ClojureScript while nice is not a major language so I would assume AI would perform worse in it compared to javascript.
But in the end. Choose typed languages or dynamic languages with type hints if you are going for the AI route.
Maybe that should be part of LLM benchmarking. If an LLM can handle untyped languages in the context window flawlessly, it would be a worthwhile accomplishment. I think For JS WebStorm loads a TS file for browser fundamentals and it helps drastically with this problem as well, sadly theres no similar concept for Python. Would be neat if someone implemented “Python Header Files” or something so you can provide type hints for these sort of projects.
Another feature that plays well with agentic coding is REPL driven development. I don't know why that approach hasn't caught on in more languages that could theoretically support it.