Call for Proposals. Feb. 2026 Member Survey

Greetings folks!

Clojurists Together is pleased to announce that we are opening our Q2 2026 funding round for Clojure Open Source Projects. Applications will be accepted through the 19th of March 2026 (midnight Pacific Time). We are looking forward to reviewing your proposals! More information and the application can be found here.

We will be awarding up to $33,000 USD for a total of 5-7 projects. The $2k funding tier is for experimental projects or smaller proposals, whereas the $9k tier is for those that are more established. Projects generally run 3 months, however, the $9K projects can run between 3 and 12 months as needed. We expect projects to start at the beginning of April 2026.

A BIG THANKS to all our members for your continued support. We also want to encourage you to reach out to your colleagues and companies to join Clojurists Together so that we can fund EVEN MORE great projects throughout the year.

And Now the Survey…

We surveyed the community in February to find out what what issues were top of mind and types of initiatives they would like us to focus on for this round of funding. As always, there were a lot of ideas and we hope they will be useful in informing your project proposals.

A number of themes appeared in the survey results.

The biggest theme, by far, was related to adoption and growth of Clojure. Respondents repeatedly mentioned that Clojure is niche, and although they are happy with Clojure, that makes it harder to justify for projects, to find employment, and to persuade others than it is for more popular languages. Respondents want a larger community and wider adoption. In particular, they want more public advocacy for Clojure, including videos, tutorials, public success stories, starter projects, and outreach in general.

Another major theme was AI. Respondents were concerned about AI coding assistants being perceived as having weak Clojure support, and they expressed frustration that Python is perceived as the safe choice for AI despite how well Clojure works with AI tooling. Nonetheless, respondents would like to see more work on tooling, guides, and resources for using AI with Clojure.

ClojureScript and JavaScript interop received the most specific attention. Respondents want CLJS/Cherry/Skittle to provide frictionless support for modern JavaScript standards (ES6 and ESM) and would like an overall simplification of the build and run process.

Developer experience issues came up a number of times, including: confusing error messages, poor documentation, and under-supported libraries. Improvements to any of those would be welcome.

Difficulty finding Clojure employment was another recurring theme. Respondents were not sure how to solve it, but suggested a community job board might be helpful.

February 2026 Survey

88% of respondents use or refer to projects funded by Clojurists Together

Plans for Conference Attendance in 2026 (number of mentions):

• Clojure/Conj: 8
• Dutch Clojure Days: 6
• babashka conference: 5
• Clojure South: 1
• Clojure Jam: 1
• reClojure: 1
  

If you were only to name ONE, what is the biggest challenge facing Clojure developers today and how can Clojurists Together support you or your organization in addressing those challenges? If you could wave a magic wand and change anything inside the Clojure community, what would it be? (select responses by category).

Adoption:

• Advertising video like that one on Clojure Conj five years ago or so
• Language Adoption and popularity, projects that helps to grow the popularity of the language or helps to start programming easily
• Lack of widespread adoption is not a problem… until you want to convince others that Clojure is a technology you can count on and is worth developing with. Convincing others that Clojure is a great and solid technology that’s here to stay, regardless of low(er) adoption, is sometimes tough.
• The fact that many teams and project would rule out Clojure as an option, being perceived as niche, far from mainstream, and thus risky
• I would have more Clojure evangelism. More videos/blog posts/demos around using Clojure, both about whatever is currently at the peak of the broader tech hype cycle – LLMs currently – as well as uses and topics outside of the hype cycle.

AI/LLMs

• Keeping relevant in a programming market is the top challenge. With the IA, everyone is moving toward the most popular languages. If nobody uses Clojure, it is more difficult to justify its use, no matter how much better it could be.
• The biggest challenge is the spreading expectation that everything will be done in Python because AI will fix whatever problems Python will allegedly cause.
• How will Clojure and the Community fare in the light of LLMs and coding assistants?
• We are being encouraged to use Agentic AI coding assistants, but their support for Clojure is behind that of other languages.
• How can we articulate the value of Clojure as a sustainable, modern solution when discussion about AI is taking all of the air in the room. We can for example fortify our tooling regards this. Projects such as Calva make Clojure easy to approach for newbies and ClojureMCP is a great tool for Agentic developers.
• I am unsure about how LLM driven development fits with Clojure. I find myself building some things with JS and Python. For larger projects I am relying on Clojure for it’s correctness properties and lower likelyhood of bugs.
• Support AI integration Clojure projects

Employment

• Difficulty finding interesting and reliable work, but this isn’t just Clojure-specific, the whole industry is weird right now.
• Finding employment writing Clojure code
• I would say that the biggest challenge for Clojure developers is in the job search. I’m not certain of a solution to this challenge, but perhaps some kind of Clojurists Together Job Board?

Developer Experience

• Developer tooling improvements competitive with modern JavaScript/TypeScript tooling
• Missing parts of the data science stack
• Better documentation of the tools and projects and more tutorials
• Better integration with cljs/scittle/js/typescript - separate cljs compilation too complicated - scittle/squint/cherry with ES6 integration is the way clojurescript support for ESM libraries. It’s crazy the hoops you have to jump through to use ESM with clojurescript, most people probably assume it’s not possible at all because it’s so difficult.
• Closer integration with JavaScript/TypeScript tooling -Seamless integration of cljs/cherry/scittle into the js-ecosystem with live repl and load-file support, standard sente/websocket communication included, standard/default solid telemetry/instrumentation API
• Quicker resolution of outstanding Clojure (JIRA) issues
• Have a official support program to people that focus on promote the language and/or community instead of library maintainers (like GDE from Google, MVP from Microsoft, Github Stars from Github)
• I would encourage “cljc” as a default idiom. The linter could say, “This could be a cljc file!” or “Change this to that and suddenly it would be cljc-compatible”.
• It remains Error Reporting imho, and anyone working on improving it would get my eternal gratitude.
  

What areas of the Clojure ecosystem need support? (select responses)

• “I think something around marketing/evangelism; I have worked on several teams using Clojure/ClojureScript that have had to defend the use of Clojure/ClojureScript against more mainstream JVM/JS languages, and the core issue we’ve run up against is a confluence of the following three items:
  – 1. there are more Kotlin/Scala/TypeScript/Java developers than there are Clojure/ClojureScript developers
  – 2. The salary ranges for those languages tends to be lower than that for Clojure/ClojureScript
  – 3. The greatest benefits to be gained from using Clojure/ClojureScript – systems which are far easier to understand, maintain, and extend, thus accelerating business goals – are exceptionally difficult to quantify.”
• “data.xml – My ticket has been rotting away for 14 months. :) (XML is a core technology at my company.)”
• Repl tooling and setup, more official tutorials and guides. Data validation and schemas.
• Data science, clojure for frontend
• Guides for LLM driven development that don’t invoke huge piles of software just to modify code.
• Growth to new domains and use cases, specifically scientific / academic / teaching