# Why I ever wrote Clojure

I wrote Clojure professionally for 5 years. At first I loved it, and by the end I hated it, and for the same reason: I was bored.

I can't force myself to write generic enterprise code for soulless corporations. I just can't. I tried for so many years.

But I can force myself to write generic enterprise code for soulless corporations if I can make it fun for myself.

Enter Clojure. Or Go. Or Rust. Or Zig. Or literally anything new and exciting. (These were some of mine in chronological order.)

I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored. And I bet it's the real reason for its relatively high adoption in fintech. I bet those highly intelligent engineers were just so bored.

It's an interesting problem: the highest paying jobs want the most intelligent engineers and are willing to pay them a ton. The most intelligent engineers often need money but get bored really quickly, and usually need to scratch that intellectual itch.

And no matter how you slice it, writing enterprise code is always boring, it's a relatively solved problem. Which explains why fintechs and similar have moved to saying "fine, you can put your toys into the codebase." At least this way they keep the turnover rate 2 years and not 2 months.

[edit for HN]: To clarify, I don't mean that Rich didn't also have extremely good reasons to make Clojure, given he was using Java (and maybe C++) in 2007. They're not the best languages now, but they were so broken back then that they practically caused the language revolution that caused Clojure and Go and Node etc to flourish.