A lot of living languages are based around insular communities. Clojure just fits a niche (people who want a general purpose LISP on the JVM), that's all. I can't be sure though since I am not a Clojure developer.

Clojure goes out of its way to be insular. Creating a PR upstream requires you to have been given access explicitly from Rich Hickey (or whoever admins their Gitlab instance). The Clojurians slack is invite-only. etc.

I can't speak to developing the language, but Clojurians (a very welcoming and helpful community!) is definitely not invite-only.

Linked here alongside other resources: https://clojure.org/community/resources

Oh, and there's a #clojure-dev channel.

My bad, I must have just not been using Slack right.

Sigh. Let's address this persistent misinformation.

There are many ways to contribute to Clojure and its ecosystem: https://clojure.org/community/contributing -- and a PR or patch is often the smallest, simplest part of the process because there is a lot of other work involved in making any change while maintaining stability and performance.

Clojure core and Contrib libraries use Jira for collaboration (and GitHub for hosting source code). Anyone can post to https://ask.clojure.org (maintained by the Clojure core team) with suggestions about changes, enhancements, bugs, or even just general questions. The core team and the various Contrib library maintainers are quick to create Jira issues from posts there.

Once all the groundwork has been done on an issue and it is ready for a potential patch, you can get a Jira account approved (if you're a first-time contributor) and you can attach a patch to a ticket there. See https://clojure.org/dev/dev for information about the development process which emphasizes the groundwork necessary for a change to be considered. Many hundreds of people have gone through this process: https://clojure.org/dev/contributors

Anyone can sign up for the Clojurians Slack at http://clojurians.net -- Slack itself forces the "invite" machinery on us but that self-signup link is well-publicized and, like many OSS community Slacks, is maintained by a team of volunteer moderators. Clojurians is on a Pro plan so it has full history/searching available, sponsored by Slack itself (much appreciated by the thousands of Clojurians!).

Disclaimer: I've been a contributor for about a decade. I've contributed to Clojure itself (a small patch for one release) and I maintain five of the Contrib libraries, which all use Jira and patches as their workflow.

This is just not true at all.

Everyone can join the Clojurians slack, it is a very welcoming place, also to newcomers, in my experience.

Everyone can create issues and patches, getting them accepted may take a long time, but the core team does a great job of maintaining high quality and not breaking things.

The Clojurians slack is... invite only? Not now, not ever. There's some kind of slack boilerplate sign up thing but it's the same as all Slack channels.

You think Java of C# (originally) is any better?

Is Java supposed to be the best or the worst here? comparing oneself to the worst is not a good look…

I’d rather Clojure have a nice open tracker system you can submit issues/PRs to instantly (without preapproval) like most Github/Gitea-hosted OSS projects do.

It's an open source project, the benefit of being a bit closed down is that you can then focus on coding instead of scrolling through issues/PR all day. Who wants to do that?

Open source was invented to make the barrier to contribution easier. Putting up a barrier is therefore counterproductive. By your logic, just force everyone to fork their own copy if they want to make changes, so no one has to scroll through PRs/issues.

And they wonder why no one has solved the curse of lisp?

clojure adoption is slow but still increasing. If you go by this logic any language that isn't the current most trending one is dead. Clojure has it's niche as immutable lisp. That itself has not the broadest appeal but thats ok.