State of Clojure 2025 Results

80 countries represented

80 different countries were represented by respondents to the State of Clojure Survey!

Responses by Country

The Top 10 countries, by count:

In fact, the top 4 countries constituted 50.1% of the respondents, so by the numbers, the United States, Brazil, Germany, and the United Kingdom have the same number of Clojure users as the rest of the world.

What if we adjust for population? We can see where Clojure is most concentrated per capita.

Northern Europe has an especially high concentration of Clojurists.

Responses by Per Capita

Also, despite the population differences, Austria, Australia, United States, Brazil, and Canada all have a similar concentration of Clojurists.

82% of Clojure developers have 6 or more years of professional programming experience

Experienced developers continue to be well represented in the Clojure community.

Question: How many years have you been programming professionally?

Clojure attracts developers across a wide range of professional experience

Clojure isn’t just appealing to highly experienced professional developers. Clojure also attracts developers with little to no professional experience. New Clojure developers are from a wide range of professional programming experience.

Professional experience for those with ≤ 1 year of Clojure experience

Most Clojure developers use Clojure as their primary language

About 2/3 of the respondents use Clojure as their primary language. When Clojure isn’t primary, popularity seems to influence language choice more than a specific language attribute (such as a functional style).

Question: What was your PRIMARY language in the last year?

Clojure is used in a mix of popular languages.

10% of Clojure developers indicated that they only used Clojure. All others indicated at least one other language they used. This choice, like the primary language, appears to be influenced by popularity, although functional languages (eg. Elixir, Lisp, Scheme/Racket, etc.) appear to be overrepresented versus their general popularity.

Question: What programming languages have you used in the last year? (select all)

1 in 10 Clojure developers would quit programming without Clojure

The results below are for developers that selected Clojure and its dialects as their primary language.

Question: If you couldn’t use Clojure, what language would you use instead?

Unsurprisingly, the most popular languages are well represented in the top choices: Java, Python, TypeScript, Go, etc., but notice the functional languages are overrepresented versus their general popularity: Elixir, Common Lisp, Scheme/Racket, Haskell, and Erlang.

The design of the Elixir language was influenced by Clojure, so it makes sense that it would stand out as a Clojure alternative versus other functional languages.

Clojure developers are very likely to recommend Clojure to others.

70% of the respondents said they were very likely to recommend Clojure with only 8% saying they would not.

Question: How likely is it that you would recommend Clojure to a friend or colleague?

Work use continues to lead, but hobby programming is popular too.

Survey respondents have nearly as much fun with Clojure (52% for hobbies) as more serious uses (71% for work).

Question: How would you characterize your use of Clojure today? (select all)

Fintech, Enterprise Software, and Healthcare are the top industries for Clojure at over 51% combined.

Clojure is used across a range of industries, but Financial Services, Enterprise Software and Healthcare stand out as the top ones. Fintech is 2.5x more popular for Clojure than Enterprise Software and over 4x more popular than Healthcare.

Question: What primary industry do you develop for?

Clojure is used at large companies and small companies alike.

16% of Clojurists are solo developers. 55% are in an organization of 100 people or less. 26% are in an organization larger than 1000 people—​many are likely part of Nubank, the world’s largest digital-only financial services platform, which employs thousands of Clojure developers.

Question: What is your organization size?

Clojure continues to attract and retain developers.

15% of respondents have used Clojure for one year or less. That’s roughly equivalent to the 16% that have used Clojure 11-15 years. With 16+ years of experience, 3% of the Clojure community is made up of Clojure’s earliest adopters.

Question: How long have you been using Clojure?

Using equally sized buckets, it becomes clear that about half the community has 5 or less years of Clojure experience and the other half has 6 or more years.

Years of Clojure experience

Functional programming, work, Lisp heritage, and Rich Hickey’s talks are the top reasons for investigating Clojure.

The survey asked developers with ≤ 1 year of Clojure experience to select all the factors that first prompted them to investigate Clojure.

Question: Why did you first start looking at Clojure? (select all)

Nearly half of new Clojure developers are unfamiliar with structured editing.

Structured editing allows a developer to efficiently edit Clojure code while keeping parenthesis and other delimiters balanced. It is especially useful for Lisp-style syntax where the distance between those delimiters ("on the outside") can span many lines of code.

As you can see below, only 19% of experienced Clojurists don’t use it ("manual") or are "not sure" about structured editing. For the inexperienced group, a full 48% don’t use it or are not sure.

Question: Which method do you use to edit Clojure code while balancing parentheses, brackets, etc? (Structured editing)

Respondents with 2 or more years of Clojure experience

Respondents with 1 year or less of Clojure experience