Official Clojure Documentary

It condenses the journey of Clojure from one programmer's pet project to becoming the infrastructure language for global fintechs into a 1-hour official documentary.

Starting from Rich Hickey's 2-year sabbatical and one stubborn idea, it follows the problem awareness and philosophy behind why Clojure was created.

Through key figures like Rich Hickey, Alex Miller, Stuart Halloway, the documentary shows Clojure's unconventional origins, its values-driven community, and its impact on software thinking. Production was sponsored by Nubank.

The show notes are densely packed with resources to help understand Clojure.

• Foundational research papers
  • Out of the Tarpit: the view that mutable state is a major cause of accidental complexity
  • Ideal Hash Trees: inspiration for Clojure's HAMT-based persistent data structures
  • Composable Memory Transactions: background for the STM concurrency model
• Influential books
  • On Lisp
  • Programming Clojure (4th ed.)
  • The Joy of Clojure
• Major talks
  • Simple Made Easy
  • Clojure at LispNYC
  • Are We There Yet?
  • Hammock Driven Development
  • The Value of Values
  • Writing Datomic in Clojure
  • Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure

For company and project case studies, Cognitect, Nubank, and Datomic are introduced, and community resources include a blog series, an IRC log archive, and etiquette guides.

An ecosystem guide is also provided.

• Runtimes and dialects: Clojure, ClojureScript, ClojureCLR
• Extension projects: Babashka, Jank, ClojureDart, Squint / Cherry
• Data science: libpython-clj, Noj, Tablecloth
• AI integration: ECA, Backseat Driver, ClojureMCP, MCP-nREPL, clojure-mcp-light
• Getting started paths: the official guide, Babashka, ClojureScript + Shadow CLJS, ClojureDart, libpython-clj, Calva

At the end, it briefly explains core concepts like Lisp, REPL, persistent data structure, STM, and hosted language, and wraps up with official channels and information on the Clojure/Conj Conference 2026.