This is pure and complete FUD. Clojure is not some esoteric language you can't hire people for. My team has been working with it for over 7 years, and we never had a problem hiring people.

Today, there are plenty of companies using Clojure and consulting. There are literally thousands of Clojure programmers in the US, and many more around the world.

Meanwhile, Clojure is used by companies such as Amazon, Apple, Boeing, and Walmart. This isn't some obscure language anymore.

In terms of performance, Clojure is well known to be fast, and it runs circles around Python without any optimizations.