April 16, 2026
When a chill lang gets a messy doc
Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links
New Clojure documentary drops and instantly splits the nerds: nostalgia, bank money and ‘AI slop’ collide
TLDR: A new documentary tells the origin story of the Clojure programming language and its rise into big-money banking, but the community is split between warm nostalgia and outrage over an AI-style version of its creator. Fans argue over ethics and whether Clojure is still worth learning in an AI-first world.
A new full-length documentary has just turned Clojure – a quiet, brainy programming language – into the main character, and the community is treating the release like a high school reunion that suddenly turns into a family fight. One ex-Clojure developer gets sentimental, remembering conferences and casually flexing that their tiny startup was probably the first to hack Clojure onto Amazon’s early cloud. It’s pure “back in my day” energy, and fans are eating it up.
Then someone walks in and flips the table: one commenter calls the AI-generated likeness of Clojure’s creator Rich Hickey “AI slop” and “gross,” accusing the producers of totally ignoring his anti-AI stance. Overnight, the cozy love letter to a niche language becomes a debate about ethics, taste, and whether even the most thoughtful programming heroes are now just training data with a face.
Others skip the moral panic and ask the uncomfortable question: is Clojure even still relevant now that AI tools can help anyone code in almost any language? While some are busy defending Clojure’s legacy at huge fintech bank Nubank and gasping that Datomic, its fancy database, is now free to use, the real show is in the comments: half nostalgia tour, half culture war, with a side of “wait, should I be learning this or is it vintage tech?”
Key Points
- •A full-length Clojure documentary is released, featuring Rich Hickey, Alex Miller, and Stuart Halloway, with support from Nubank.
- •The film covers Clojure’s origins, values-driven community, and its influence on software design and engineering practice.
- •Shownotes list foundational research informing Clojure: Out of the Tarpit, HAMTs (Ideal Hash Trees), and Composable Memory Transactions (STM), plus a curated bibliography.
- •Influential books and extensive talks by Rich Hickey are compiled, including transcripts and playlists for major presentations.
- •The page outlines companies/projects (Cognitect, Nubank, Datomic), Clojure runtimes (JVM, ClojureScript, ClojureCLR), data-science/interop tools, and official getting-started resources.