Frankly, the selling point that clojure minimizes risk is not a compelling one. It sounds sexy, but its nonsensical.
Risk encompasses many aspects of technical decisions and there's a complicated set of interactions between these aspects. Saying a single language minimizes risk makes little sense.
For instance, if you're building a straight-up CRUD web app Ruby on Rails minimizes risk best. If you're building a realtime chat service node.js minimizes risk best (and I say this as a longtime detractor of node, its not the best thing engineering wise, but it's an 80% solution).
While I'm glad the speaker enjoyed success using Clojure, I don't think we need a slogan to promote Clojure, we need more killer platforms. We need problem-spaces where when someone asks "What's the highest quality implementation of X?" people say, well, clojure has XYZ, it's way ahead of the pack.
To my mind where clojure hits the sweet spot is in mixing performance with elegance. It's got a fantastic balance there for web apps. I would love for clojure to be the answer to the question of "our app servers are too slow". However, the ecosystem is just not there yet.
Between noir, immutant, aleph, and vert.x I think we have a bright future there, but whether clojure will hit critical mass to become a dominant platform anywhere is nigh impossible to predict.
if you're building a straight-up CRUD web app Ruby
on Rails minimizes risk best. If you're building a
realtime chat service node.js minimizes risk best
I do not agree with you on this one. I'm not into Node.js precisely because (for now) I consider it to increase the risk of any project.
Yes, your realtime chat will be easy to do with Node.js, but most web applications also need to talk to a database, and also need to do some background processing, and also need to communicate with third-party services through many protocols, sometimes hip, sometimes obscure and long-forgotten. And your app will also probably need at some point a freakishly boring admin filled with freakishly boring reports.
And building a multi-platform, multi-lingual project does lead to resource drainage and duplicate effort. This is one reason why Node.js is popular in the first place, because presumably people can share logic between the client and the server ; but in the larger context of things with Node.js I feel like I'm digging myself into a corner, just like I did with PHP several years ago.
Personally I'm starting to like the JVM more and more. Want to do a really scalable chat app in several lines of code? There's a solution for that [+]. Want to talk with the most obscure database in existence? The JVM can do it. Want to have your binaries work in 10 years from now? The JVM can do it. Want to use your hardware to the maximum? The JVM is the second best choice after C/C++. Want to make your sysops happy? The monitoring/profiling/deployment tools available for the JVM have absolutely no match.
I'm probably too cynical, but I think a big reason for node's popularity these days is the same as it was for rails 5-6 years ago - greenfield projects.
If I'm doing node now, it's not maintaining some legacy crap from 5 years ago - it's straight up new development. I get to do what I want. I don't think that factor comes in to the equation enough when people are talking about efficiencies and productivity metrics and such.
I still do a fair amount of PHP - my productivity maintaining PHP apps written by other people 5-10 years ago is pretty different from PHP I write from scratch, getting to use modern tools/libraries/techniques.
Yes, atmosphere is pretty cool - I'm looking at adding it to a project this fall. grails install-plugin atmosphere ;)
I don't think we need a slogan to promote Clojure, we need more killer platforms. We need problem-spaces where when someone asks "What's the highest quality implementation of X?" people say, well, clojure has XYZ, it's way ahead of the pack.
Datomic (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-Design-of-Datomic) is going to be one of Clojure's killer apps -- it adds durability to Clojure's immutable, persistent data structures, and it rethinks datastore design, from the ground up, to take advantage of modern storage services.
Risk encompasses many aspects of technical decisions and there's a complicated set of interactions between these aspects. Saying a single language minimizes risk makes little sense.
For instance, if you're building a straight-up CRUD web app Ruby on Rails minimizes risk best. If you're building a realtime chat service node.js minimizes risk best (and I say this as a longtime detractor of node, its not the best thing engineering wise, but it's an 80% solution).
While I'm glad the speaker enjoyed success using Clojure, I don't think we need a slogan to promote Clojure, we need more killer platforms. We need problem-spaces where when someone asks "What's the highest quality implementation of X?" people say, well, clojure has XYZ, it's way ahead of the pack.
To my mind where clojure hits the sweet spot is in mixing performance with elegance. It's got a fantastic balance there for web apps. I would love for clojure to be the answer to the question of "our app servers are too slow". However, the ecosystem is just not there yet.
Between noir, immutant, aleph, and vert.x I think we have a bright future there, but whether clojure will hit critical mass to become a dominant platform anywhere is nigh impossible to predict.