This One Programming Choice Completely Changed These Tech Firms—Here's How. Part 1

Four episodes into our journey exploring real-world Clojure stories, fascinating patterns have emerged from our conversations with leaders at Quuppa, CodeScene, Catermonkey, and Griffin. While each company's domain is distinct – from indoor positioning technology to banking infrastructure – their experiences reveal compelling insights about how Clojure influences not just code but entire organizations.

Building Teams and Projects

The journey to adopting Clojure often begins with practical challenges. At Quuppa, they needed better ways to handle data serialization in their enterprise system. Catermonkey's Marten Sytema had already built a working product in Java but saw the potential for faster iteration with Clojure. Griffin recognized how Clojure's immutable-by-default nature perfectly matched the inherent requirements of banking. Each team's path was different, but they all faced similar questions about building and growing Clojure teams.

The Hiring Reality

The smaller Clojure talent pool, often seen as a limitation, has proven to be an unexpected advantage. As James Trunk from Griffin puts it,

Rather than requiring Clojure experience, successful teams look for developers with functional programming backgrounds or, more importantly, the right mindset. Experience with Haskell, Erlang, OCaml, or even Scala often indicates developers who will understand Clojure's approach.

Location doesn't have to be a constraint, either. When Catermonkey, based in a rural part of the Netherlands, needed to grow its team, it found that remote work eliminated geographical limitations. More importantly, it discovered that Clojure works as a natural filter, attracting developers who deeply understand and are excited about functional programming principles.

The Learning Curve Myth

Despite concerns about Clojure's learning curve, teams consistently report success in onboarding new developers. Clojure's learning curve reputation appears to be based more on misconceptions than reality.

First, any competent developer can learn Clojure quickly because the core concepts are simple - it's mostly functions and data. The challenge isn't technical complexity but adjusting to a different way of thinking. As Griffin found, developers with functional programming backgrounds adapt particularly well, having already made this mental shift.

Second, being unfamiliar with traditional enterprise patterns can actually be an advantage. When Quuppa brought in fresh graduates, they picked up Clojure naturally - they had no preconceptions about how systems "should" be built. They didn't have to unlearn complex inheritance hierarchies or intricate design patterns.

This matches what Marten observed at Catermonkey - developers who embrace Clojure's approach become productive quickly. The learning curve isn't so much steep as it is different. Instead of memorizing frameworks and patterns, developers learn to compose simple tools effectively.

The tooling complaints often cited as a barrier seem outdated. Modern editors like VS Code with Calva provide smooth onboarding experiences. The REPL quickly becomes a natural part of the development workflow once developers experience its benefits.

What these teams found isn't that Clojure is easy to learn, but that learning it is worthwhile. The investment pays off in increased productivity and capability.

How Clojure Shapes Development

Clojure's influence on development goes beyond technical advantages - it fundamentally changes what teams can achieve and how they work together.

The Productivity Multiplier

These teams aren't choosing to stay small - Clojure enables them to handle complex challenges without needing large teams. Griffin built a banking-as-a-service platform with 40 engineers, where similar projects typically require hundreds. This increased productivity shapes everything from how decisions are made to how problems are solved.

Their technical decision-making process is a direct result of this dynamic. Because the team is naturally more focused, Griffin can afford thoughtful processes like anonymous voting on technical decisions. When your team is small enough that everyone understands the whole system, you can have genuine technical discourse rather than hierarchical decision-making.

Simple Tools, Complex Problems

The productivity advantage comes largely from Clojure's emphasis on simplicity. This isn't about avoiding complexity - it's about having the right tools to tackle it efficiently.

Griffin's experience shows how this translates to serious enterprise systems. Building a banking platform requires handling complex requirements around transactions, compliance, and scale. Yet they found Clojure "just gets out of your way and shows you, okay, here's data, here are the functions that work on that data, here's a pipeline." The language's focus on data transformation and simple composable functions lets them build sophisticated systems without the accidental complexity that typically drives the need for larger teams.

This combination of simplicity and power means teams can focus on actual business problems rather than managing complexity. They don't need layers of abstraction, elaborate frameworks, or large teams coordinating different system parts - they can build robust solutions with small, focused teams using simple tools effectively.

Long-Term Impact

The most compelling insights come from observing how these choices play out over time. CodeScene grew from a solo project to a team of 15 while maintaining the ability to innovate. Griffin scaled from 7 to over 40 engineers while building a robust banking platform. Catermonkey expanded from serving 15 customers to over 200 across multiple countries.

It's clear that choosing a programming language is never just a technical decision. It's a choice that shapes how teams work together, grow, and approach problems. In that light, these early conversations suggest that Clojure's real value might lie not just in its technical merits but in how it influences the entire practice of building and maintaining software systems.