Aaron Bedra’s rousing talk on day 2 was a great call to arms to celebrate the people that have made Clojure what it is and to inspire others to join the cause. Make no mistake, if you like Clojure and want it to be an option that people are allowed to even consider much less use, then this fight is your fight.

If Clojure is not your favorite language that’s ok – my goal is NOT to “win” a war of languages. I like lots of different languages. I don’t expect or want everyone to use Clojure. What I will fight for is to make Clojure a viable choice that PHBs will accept so *I* can continue working in it for a long long time.

Aaron had a section at the end for people to relay their experience with Clojure (testify!) and I think this is an important thing to do. I really love Clojure. I think it’s a game-changing language. It’s not perfect but in my polyglot ways I don’t see any other language out there that has the combination of a powerful simple core, the relentless focus on being a pragmatic, workable, high-performance general purpose language, the GIGANTIC potential for actually leveraging multiple cores with a minimum of ceremony, and reuse of the best of the existing JVM ecosystem.

The biggest challenge in my opinion is not any of the bumps along that technical path though; it’s in getting through the trough in the hype cycle. The only way that’s going to happen is if the referenceable success stories are so numerous and visible that it’s a non-issue whether it’s a viable choice.

If you are looking for something you can do to help, there are lots of places to apply effort: improve installation, dependency management, documentation, tutorials, cookbooks, and more. Start a user group in your area if there isn’t one! If you have success with Clojure, talk about it!