Saturday, October 22, 2011

The 2011 ClojureCLR survey is open

Inspired by Chas Emerick's State of Clojure survey,  I've created a similar survey to assess the state of the ClojureCLR community and to gather ideas for moving ClojureCLR forward.

The survey is at:  


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDE3YnlYbXBxc3ljVU80bjNnTVZaMlE6MQ

The survey will remain open through October 31, 2011.


The first code commit to the ClojureCLR github site occurred on February 1, 2009. Today, ClojureCLR is a 99% feature-complete implementation of Clojure. It closely tracks developments in the JVM implementation. It is current with the 1.3.0  release (and has been current and mostly feature-complete since at least 1.1, in January, 2010).

Apparently, there is some interest in ClojureCLR.  The binary distribution of the 1.2.0 version has been downloaded 772 times.  The repo has 267 watchers, 29% of the number of watchers on the main Clojure repo.

Despite those measures, it is hard to get a sense of use, community or momentum for ClojureCLR.  The few queries on IRC often go unanswered; the mailing list sees no mention; there are no bug reports; and there is almost no sign of people asking for features or pitching in to create something simple like wrapper code or ports of the contrib libs.

What will help create that community?  What will increase confidence in the viability of this port of Clojure?  I hope this survey will give some guidance for moving ClojureCLR forward.