A year ago today I 'released' Clojure, by sending a message to my jFli and Foil mailing lists. It got blogged, picked up by Planet Lisp and redditted in the course of a day or so, and has been a wild ride ever since. I couldn't have possibly imagined the year Clojure (and I) have had.
Community Releasing a language means hoping others will use it, and I truly appreciate the risks taken by those very first users, trying Clojure of their own interest and initiative with no recommendations or testimonials. I've tried to repay that interest with support and explanations, bug fixes and enhancements. Most satisfying has been seeing a community grow, and gain a collective experience it can share. We're now at 650 members on the Google Group, and have had over 4500 message over the year, 500 messages in the first half of October alone! Even better, only 15% of those messages were mine (down from 50% in the early days). There are newcomers kicking the tires, people who've spent enough time to know their way around, and those who, through their extended experience, really 'get' the model behind Clojure, and have developed idiomatic sensibilities. In addition, it's a diverse community, including some Java experts, and some Lisp experts, with experience in a wide variety of domains, all of which is being shared too. The discourse and attitude has been consistently positive and supportive, and Clojure has benefitted tremendously from the feedback and suggestions of the user community. Contributors Releasing something as open source means hoping that, eventually, giving something away will yield returns of contributions that will allow your project to grow in ways you couldn't achieve alone. I'm happy to see that starting now, as people get familiar enough with how Clojure works to make tangible contributions. A substantial source of contributions that don't end up in Clojure itself are on the tools side. People have built editor support for emacs and vim, the enclojure IDE for Netbeans, swank/slime etc. Other contributions take the form of additions to the wiki, tutorial blogs, and answering questions on the group and IRC. Awareness Clojure has gotten a lot of attention - I've been invited to give talks at the Dynamic Languages Symposium at ECOOP, the European Lisp Workshop, IBM Research, the JVM Languages Summit, Boston Lisp, and next week at Lisp 50 at OOPSLA. There has been a lot of blogging, which continues to grow. Clojure has made its presence felt in both the Lisp and JVM communities it bridges, which have very little overlap otherwise. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The Language I've done almost 600 checkins in the past year. Many were small bug fixes and enhancements, others were significant features like first- class namespaces, in-source docs, gen-class and proxy, primitives support, ad hoc hierarchies, destructuring, list comprehensions, var metadata, regex support, zippers, first-class sets, agents, struct maps, java.util integration, parallel support, etc. All of this happened in a context of considerable stability and robustness, which is a testament to the Lisp model of using a small core, with most of the language provided by independent functions and macros. Moving Forward The net result is that the prospects for Clojure going forward are very good. The core model of Clojure has held up well and continues to appeal - accessible, robust, thread-safe, efficient dynamic functional programming, on a world-class infrastructure, with a huge set of libraries. Oh yeah, and it's great fun! People coming to Clojure now find a vibrant community, plenty of support, a variety of tools and more on the way, a wiki and blogs full of examples, a book on the way, many online screencasts and talks, a huge message archive etc. The language itself continues to grow in capabilities while remaining stable, and the growing pool of contributors promises more hands in pursuing bug fixes and new features. There's still more to do, but more people to do it as well. I designed and built Clojure so that I could pursue the next 20 years of my career in a language I wouldn't mind thinking in. In order to be commercially accepted, a language needs to be technically viable and have wide enough awareness and use. I think Clojure has great prospects in both of those areas, as it continues to improve and usage grows. Thanks to all for being part of Clojure! On to year two, Rich --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
