It definitely is more "mainstream" than others but I just don't see the same level of attention and enthusiasm around it anymore. I'm sure it is still being used in many places but like Elixir, hiring remains on the tough end.
Hiring good talent was always problematic. This has nothing to do with the quality, capacity, and robustness of the language or its relevance. Hiring people who would love to use Clojure but have no prior experience is not that difficult - it's just that every company wants an expert, but they don't want to offer expert salaries. In places where they do, the competition is nuts, on top of that, experienced Clojuristas typically get interviewed and scrutinized with the same level of rigor as architects.
The industry should have optimized for hiring people interested in PLs like Clojure instead of LeetCode drillers. Clojure is rarely the first, second, or even third programming language people choose to learn. It demands a specific vision, dedication, and discipline that fundamentally transforms how people think about computation, data flow, distributed systems, and concurrency. The ROI from hiring an average developer experienced in Clojure has the potential to significantly exceed that of a typical hire. Even when there's zero Clojure in prod.
I've had Clojure on my resume for 10 years, mainly to see if anyone would ask about it. Nobody ever has, until an interview a couple days ago. We'll see if it actually helps in leading to an offer, I guess.
I have the opposite experience - been using Clojure for over a decade and it feels like only that mattered for the last five jobs. Even though it's really only just one of many layers that required to do the job. I honestly would love to find a non-clj team and convince them to use it. There are so many useful scripts we write in babaska alone, it just sounds wasteful not to use that path, fully knowing of its existence.
Imagine what you'd use random shell scripts, Makefile/Justfile or whatever "scripts" the language offers, if any, but written in Clojure instead, run with Babashka.
Anything that we previously used Bash or Python for - any complex task delegation from GHA; utility scripts for setting up proper ssh tunneling for various k8s clusters; there's pretty complex CLI tool we build for testing our services in ephemeral SDEs running our pods.
Personally: all my MCPs are written in Clojure - https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions; I write small web-scraping scripts and automations in nbb with Playwright. The flexibility of starting the REPL and figuring out the rest of it dynamically, while poking through DOM elements directly from the editor is some blackmagicfuckery that should be outlawed. Imagine being able to control the state of the web browser while typing some incantations in your editor, without much ceremony, without some crazy scaffolding, without "frameworks", without even having to save the code into a file. You gotta be some ignorant fool who doesn't know this was at all possible or a complete idiot to say "meh, but all these parentheses". You gotta be kidding me. It's like if someone gave you a magic car attachment that makes it run for 800 miles on a single charge and you'd say: "meh, I don't like the color of it"...
