Considering its ecosystem, what do most here use Clojure for or what do you think is its sweet spot? I used it in a project with pg/ring/reitit and while some things were nicer it was not better enough to make me switch from pg/nodejs/express for new projects. Used emacs with inf-clojure (found cider too bloated and buggy, was tempted to port some features of cider to a fork of inf-clojure) and macros were helpful in a couple of places, but other than that, you can write JS almost as how most use Clojure. Also found JS to be faster unless you got out of your way to write Javaish Clojure, which reminds that is was a time sink having to deal with Java libs(it's really not as "seamless" as most advertise) because of no Clojure equivalents.
Nowadays I use Clojure as my primary general purpose programming language.
As far as sweet spots go, due to pervasive immutability, I think it can be a good choice anytime you're dealing with concurrency.
If you're dealing with relatively straightforward web applications, outside certain specialized scenarios (and certain really bad choices) I don't think language choice matters.
Clojure's sweet spot is very much the "situated program" Hickey likes to talk about. Clojure is a great fit for line of business apps where maps really are the right choice for modeling your domain.
We recently evaluated Clojure vs node for an upcoming project and went with Clojure because while most of the work really is just querying a db and writing JSON, we also do a fair amount of heavy reporting and pdf generation which will bring node to a crawl relatively speaking. Rather than have to take on the operational complexity of microservices for the slower parts of our app we just went with a Clojure monolith. The draw of a single language to work with for both client and server was very tempting, but ultimately the JVM won out on the server.
I'd be amiss if I didn't also say the whole Deno situation has us worried about the long-term implications of spinning up a brand new node project, where the JVM seems far more reliable logistically.
As far as ecosystem, Clojure itself is smaller, but the whole JVM ecosystem is huge and you have access to that.
We're not at a point where we've figured out how we're doing report generation yet. Internally we do not have extensive experience with either Clojure or Node, but we have heard issues from colleagues with Node and running into performance issues by trying to do too much on the main thread. Since our load demands are not that high, and we're migrating from Rails so we already expect a very nice performance bump, rejection of Node is more a choice of avoiding potential downfalls rather than a fully informed decision based on experience with Node.
