Clojure 2012 Year in Review

• The Clojure mailing list has over seven thousand members.

• Chas Emerick’s State of Clojure Survey got twice as many responses as in 2011.

• Two new mailing lists spun up, clojure-tools for “Clojure toolsmiths” and clojure-sec for “security issues affecting those building applications with Clojure.”

• Clojure moved into the “Adopt” section of ThoughtWorks’ Technology Radar in October.

• Conferences! I hereby dub 2012 the “year of the Clojure conference.” The first ever Clojure/West took place in San Jose in March, and Clojure/conj returned to Raleigh in November. London got into the Clojure conference action with EuroClojure in May and Clojure eXchange in December.

• O’Reilly got into the Clojure book game with two releases: the massive Clojure Programming by Chas Emerick, Christophe Grand, and Brian Carper; and the pocket-sized ClojureScript: Up and Running by me and Luke VanderHart (see link for a discount code valid until Feb. 1, 2013).

• Clojure contributors closed 113 JIRA tickets on the core language (not counting duplicates).

• Clojure 1.4 introduced tagged literals, and the Extensible Data Notation (edn) began an independent existence, including implementations in Ruby and JavaScript.

• Clojure 1.5 entered “release candidate” status, bringing the new reducers framework and new threading macros.

• The big news, of course, was the release of Datomic, a radical new database from Rich Hickey and Relevance, in March. Codeq, a new way to look at source code repositories, followed in October.

• Light Table, a new IDE oriented towards Clojure, rocketed to over $300,000 in pledges on Kickstarter and entered the Summer 2012 cohort of YCombinator.

• Speaking of tooling, what a bounty! Leiningen got a major new version, as did nREPL and tools.namespace. Emacs users finally escaped the Common Lisp SLIME with nrepl.el.

• Red Hat’s Immutant became the first comprehensive application server for Clojure.

• ClojureScript One demonstrated techniques for building applications in ClojureScript.

• Planet Clojure now aggregates over 400 blogs.

• I laid out some history and motivation for the Clojure contribution process in Clojure/huh? – Clojure’s Governance and How It Got That Way.

• Chas Emerick’s Mostly Lazy podcast featured Phil Hagelberg, Anthony Grimes, and Chris Houser.

• Michael Fogus interviewed prominent Clojure community members in his “take 5” series: Anthony Grimes, Jim Crossley, Colin Jones, Daniel Spiewak, Baishampayan Ghose, Kevin Lynagh, William Byrd, Arnoldo Jose Muller-Molina, and Sam Aaron.

• Craig Andera launched the Relevance podcast, where he interviewed many Clojurists such as Timothy Baldridge, Jason Rudolph, Rich Hickey (twice), me!, Clojure conference organizers, Michael Fogus (twice), Stuart Halloway, Alan Dipert, Aaron Bedra, Brenton Ashworth, and David Liebke.

I have no idea what 2013 is going to bring. But if I were to venture a guess, I’d say it’s going to be a fantastic time to be working in Clojure.