State of Clojure 2016 Results

A whopping 60% of respondents who use Clojure at work are building applications for people "outside my organization". We changed the wording of the answers to this question from the 2015 survey, so a direct head-to-head comparison isn’t possible. However, in 2015, fully 70% of respondents said their use was for "personal" projects, while 42% said "company-wide/enterprise". This year, only 5% answered "just me". Even without the direct results comparison, the data shows a dramatic shift towards building products.

This year we also introduced a new question, asking what industry or industries people develop for. For commercial users, "Enterprise Software" was the leader (at 22%), followed by "Financial services/fintech", "Retail/ecommerce", "Consumer software", "Media/advertising", and "Healthcare". Everything else was at under 5% reporting. When we dig deeper and look at each of those industries in turn, we find that within each one, "outside my organization" is still the most common answer. In fact, only in "Financial services/fintech" do internal tools come within 15% of "outside my organization".

Last year, 51% of respondents said they were deploying into the public cloud. This year, that number is up to 57%, coming almost entirely at the expense of "traditional infrastructure" (private/hybrid cloud was essentially unmoved). Recently, rescale released a report estimating that "we are in fact only at about 6% enterprise cloud penetration today" (https://blog.rescale.com/cloud-3-0-the-rise-of-big-compute/). Clojurists in the workforce are considerably ahead of this curve, if true.

There is, unsurprisingly, a heavy correlation between use of the public cloud and developing applications for use "outside my organization". The use of the public cloud also skews heavily towards smaller organizations (companies of fewer than 100 people make up 70% of the public cloud group, while only 55% of the "traditional infrastructure" fell into that category).

There were only two industries where traditional infrastructure dramatically beat public cloud: Government/Military (which seems obvious) and Academia (which seems sad, although it could be a reflection of universities' sunk investment in infrastructure). And only Telecom had a majority of respondents indicating "private/hybrid", which is almost certainly a reflection of the fact that hybrid cloud offerings are, by and large, products from the Telecom sector.

If you look at the spread of response for size of organization, while there is a clear winner (11-100), the split is fairly even otherwise. A full 17% of responses were from companies of 1000+ people.

Web development and open source development are the dominant two domains regardless of company size, but coming in at a strong #3 is "building and delivering commercial services", except when you look at responses from 1000+ companies, in which case "enterprise apps" unsurprisingly moves ahead.

"Enterprise software" is the #1 industry regardless of company size. However, #2 is quite distinctly different across sizes — in smaller companies (< 100 employees), "consumer software" is the strong #2, whereas for companies > 100 employees, financial services is the dominant #2.

(An interesting aside: most industries show a normal bell curve, with most respondents coming from the middle two categories, 11-100 and 101-1000. For example:

Only two industries show the inverted bell curve, with the most respondents at the edges — Academia, and Government/Military.

You will note that these are the two industries where "traditional infrastructure" also dominates, so the distribution of respondents either being from the largest [most conservative] and smallest [most disruptive] paints an interesting picture of how industries change.)

As was true the last two years, error messages and "hiring and staffing" are the top 2 reasons given for "What has been most frustrating or has prevented you from using Clojure more than you do now?" though both have fallen several percent since then. Interestingly, "Need docs/tutorials" has jumped from #5 in 2015 to #3 now, which corresponds well with a continuing growth of new entrants into the community.

When you break down respondents by size, each category is relatively uniform with one glaring exception: for some reason, companies of 100-1000+ people have a problem with the lack of static typing (it is a strong #3 in that cohort). Everyone else has a carbon copy distribution of the overall answers. When you look by industry, the "enterprise software" crowd would clearly benefit from more tools and a better IDE experience.

What we found fascinating was drilling through the free answer portion of the responses to this question. Next year, we’ll be adding a new possible answer: "corporate aversion to new technologies". If it was captured as one of the main responses, it would come in #2 or #3 overall. We clearly have work to do as a community to arm the technologists who wish to adopt Clojure with the materials and support they need to overcome internal inertia or resistance. That’s an area we’d love to both see more people contributing, but also letting us at Cognitect know what else we could provide that would be useful.

When you dig into these numbers, you see a technology that has been accepted as a viable tool for crafting solutions across industries, company types and sizes, and target domains. As you might expect, adoption of Clojure seems closely correlated with the adoption of other new technologies, like the public cloud, and Clojure is beset with some of the same headwinds, like corporate aversion to new things. We are encouraged by the maturation of the community and of the ability of the technology and its adherents to tackle the hard problems of commercial software development.