Why would you expected a dialect of Lisp to become popular in the Packer's and Pointy Haired Bosses Paradise (a ready-made ecosystem for sweatshops and coding factories of easily replaceable coding drones)?
A bit more seriously (which does not mean than anything in the previous paragraph is less true) the Java ecosystem has been grossly oversold from the very beginning, and even Rich himself has been converted (I still remember how I spat when I listened to his praise for Java as the best target platform in his very first marketing videos).
Clojure has been very well positioned and cleverly promoted (basically bringing decades of research by very bright people culminating in the Common Lisp to the Java Land of packers) but there was (and is) no demand for it and very few of those who could understand and appreciate the principles and ideas on which it has been founded.
It is dying for the very same reasons that the Common Lisp is still dying - The Worse Is Better or Idiots, Idiots Everywhere.
No one really needs a perfection (approaching perfection) of the great languages. The popular crap to get shit done for a paycheck (Java, Javascript, Ruby you name it) is what is in demand.
But this is rather a common pattern. This is exactly how the Upanishadic philosophy has been degraded into cryptic meaningless tantras, how Buddhism has been transformed into debased Lamaism, how western philosophy ended up with Hegelian nonsense and Marxism or what a sophisticated noise we have instead of Bach. The very same pattern. The world is dominated by idiots and will always be.
A bit more seriously (which does not mean than anything in the previous paragraph is less true) the Java ecosystem has been grossly oversold from the very beginning, and even Rich himself has been converted (I still remember how I spat when I listened to his praise for Java as the best target platform in his very first marketing videos).
Clojure has been very well positioned and cleverly promoted (basically bringing decades of research by very bright people culminating in the Common Lisp to the Java Land of packers) but there was (and is) no demand for it and very few of those who could understand and appreciate the principles and ideas on which it has been founded.
It is dying for the very same reasons that the Common Lisp is still dying - The Worse Is Better or Idiots, Idiots Everywhere.
No one really needs a perfection (approaching perfection) of the great languages. The popular crap to get shit done for a paycheck (Java, Javascript, Ruby you name it) is what is in demand.
But this is rather a common pattern. This is exactly how the Upanishadic philosophy has been degraded into cryptic meaningless tantras, how Buddhism has been transformed into debased Lamaism, how western philosophy ended up with Hegelian nonsense and Marxism or what a sophisticated noise we have instead of Bach. The very same pattern. The world is dominated by idiots and will always be.