On Oct 16, 9:36 pm, Rich Hickey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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
Congrats to Rich and the Clojure community. I know I keep
trying to find reasons to use Clojure every day rather than
something else. It a very enjoyable experience :)
Parth
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