Clojure 2011 Year in Review

A new year is upon us. Before the world ends, let’s take a look back at what 2011 meant for everybody’s favorite programming language:

• Clojure 1.3.0 was released, bringing better performance to numeric applications, reader syntax for record types, and other enhancements.

• ClojureScript was unveiled to the world, leading to universal confusion about how to pronounce “Clojure” differently from “Closure.”

• The second Clojure/conj went off without a hitch but plenty of bang.

• Logic programming burst into the mindspace of Clojure developers with core.logic.

• Clojure-contrib was completely restructured to support new libraries, a distributed development model, and an automated release process.

• ClojureCLR got a new home and recognition as a Clojure sub-project.

• David Liebke introduced Avout, an extension of Clojure’s software transactional memory model to distributed computing.

• Clojure project management tools Leiningen and Cake decided to bury the hatchet and join forces for the greater good.

• Clojure/core started blogging more regularly.

• Books! The Joy of Clojure and Clojure in Action (both from Manning) hit the bookshelves. The Second Edition of Programming Clojure (Pragmatic) and Clojure Programming (O’Reilly) went into early release.

• PragPub magazine dedicated their July 2011 issue to Clojure.

• Chas Emerick released Clojure Atlas, an interactive documentation system.

• Clojure creator Rich Hickey spoke at Strange Loop and caused a minor tweet-storm.

• 4Clojure entered the world, giving thousands of programmers a new way to kill time and learn Clojure.

At this point, I’ve been typing and looking up links for an hour, so I’m calling it quits. Needless to say, this was a big year for Clojure, and I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff that I missed on this list. Regarding 2012, all I can say is, You ain’t seen nothing yet.