For a startup, you don't need "many". You need a handful. If I'm trying to hire three programmers and they are make-or-break for the success of my company, I'd much rather be picky. I'll leave the hordes of generic Java coders to the people who have to hire a hundred at once.

You are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding good engineers who you can work with. Sprinkling clojure in your job postings isn't magic. A world of difference exists between people saying "thats cool" and "I will work for you for 50% under market rates".

> Sprinkling clojure in your job postings isn't magic.

If you're trying to find these developers through job postings I don't think you're going to have much success.

Your target market is developers passionate about Clojure so if you want to hire those you need to go to where they are; which most likely isn't Monsterboard.

Sure, if you only need to hire 1 or 2 people then good people aren't terribly hard to find.

Once you get to 10 it's a very different ballgame.

Some would argue that a Lisp like Clojure means you don't need 10 people...

I have no doubt about a tenfold variance across different people, but I'm highly skeptical of any claims that a particular language will make you 10 times more productive over the long haul.

People always doubt this, and then new languages always come along that improve developer efficiency. It was a lot easier to write a program in C than assembler, Perl than C, and Python than Perl, at least for me. I've seen some amazingly sweet code in some of the functional languages like Clojure and Haskell. My current main language is Ruby, and while it is not perfect, I would never trade it as a general-purpose language for assembly. I'm sure I'm well over 10x more effective than I would be if it was all assembly, all the time -- assuming I wasn't allowed to invent a new language as part of the solution.

So why doubt this same thing can happen again? It's like doubting that MD5 will ever be broken, or questioning whether something like Roman numerals can be improved upon. Of course it can, and will.

Clojure is not a 10x improve to over java, full stop. It's not even close, and I've done a project at my day job in clojure, it's my favorite language.

Any new niche language always sing the same song to market themselves.

Unfortunately the song doesn't "keep it real".

Lisp is hardly a new language, it's the second oldest high-level programming language in the world.

Let me revised my wording: Any niche language ... ;)

I wasn't drawing any conclusions; just sharing an anecdote and the impression it left on me.

At Clojure meetups there's a palpable sense of eagerness in everyone I talk with that isn't using it on a daily basis yet though and I would find it hard to believe if that didn't have a significant monetary effect.

As far as recruitment goes, especially in large numbers, I will definitely concede that it will be hard to scale up to large numbers without using traditional hiring channels and that those channels will most certainly fail you when recruiting this specific a skill-set.