I'll go out on a limb and say that everyone on HN loves Clojure! It seems to be the least cribbed language here. Its features are hard to beat - that and Rich Hickey's wonderful talks[0] make you all the more confident in Clojure as a language!
In a community of several 10's of thousands of people saying 'everyone' is always wrong.
To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it and I highly doubt even double digits of HN would claim to be proficient, much less to love the language.
In general, you speak for yourself and yourself alone and my take from your comment is that you love clojure.
I have played around with it but not enough to be able to say that I love it, even though I would like to spend more time with it.
I'm sure that when the honeymoon phase is over clojure will be yet another useful tool in the toolbox. I can't recall a single language that I truly love, they all have their specific warts and I expect clojure to be no different in that respect.
Just a different set of limitations to applicability.
To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it...
I do not think that the GP was using 'love' in that sense. You can 'geek out' about news and information about something without actually being much involved in that something at all. Witness the popularity of posts about space launches on HN. I doubt that there are very many actual rocket scientists, but we sure do have a lot of people interested in progress made in space.
Love for space travel and love for a programming language are two different things entirely, the one is an adventure on an almost trans human scale the other is a way to tell a computer what to do.
>To love clojure you'd have to first become proficient in it and I highly doubt even double digits of HN would claim to be proficient, much less to love the language.
I'm pretty sure many times more than 99 HN people have used Clojure extensively. Heck, there have been posts here from teams using it in production on their startups.
Speaking as someone who has lately been studying Common Lisp, I'm not quite sure how I feel about Clojure; I like that it's hosted on the JVM, but I don't like the apparent lack of a debugger, which to my mind is a sine qua non of Lisp development. I haven't seen much in the way of progress on that front, either, but it's been a few months since I last looked into it; is there any sign that that handicap is likely to be repaired?
I'm the author of Cursive, a Clojure IDE based on IntelliJ. Cursive currently has a fairly minimal and occasionally frustrating debugger that I'm planning to improve soon. That said, I use it all the time and it works pretty well. It's really nice to be able to debug a REPL session. Currently breakpoints and stepping work well, and expression evaluation somewhat works but is pretty quirky. Types and names are all currently displayed as Java, unfortunately. I'm planning to have a debug REPL per stack frame when I get around to upgrading this part. I'm hoping to get to this sometime within the next month.
Well, I'm glad to see that you at least appear to be headed in more or less the right direction. I'm not about to invest $100 in Clojure at this early stage of the language's development, but I'll be interested to see how the tooling continues to progress.
[0] - http://www.infoq.com/author/Rich-Hickey