The premise of the original post seems quite flawed as its only dealing with one issue, the technology platform, for which the majority of employed developers have little or no say.
Also basiing a strategy on popularity is also incredibly flawed (i.e. everyone allegedly’ hates using JIRA yet its still the most used commercial ticketing system by developers)
A more valuable question to ask would be:
“How can the Clojure community effectively reach out to the wider development community to continue the adoption of Clojure/Script/CLR”
With a follow-on question:
“How can the Clojure community provide confidence to companies and industry that Clojure is a viable technology choice (a part of which is about hiring Clojure developers)”
I understood the major appeal to Clojure/Script/CLR was the language itself, the fact that “Clojure” is a hosted language is a removal of a barrier to adoption and not the main reason to adopt.
The Clojure syntax, a powerful REPL, a focus on simple design, a focus on data design, and wealth of open source libraries seem far more relevant to adoption by developers regardless of their background.
With Clojure starting on the JVM then familiar tools and environment would help ease adoption, but there has to be an over-riding driver to changing language. A Java developer is not going to invest time in learning a new language (and functional programming paradigm) just because they can sneak in an uberjar file into their current Java stack. Having a simple way to deploy into an existing stack does remove an important barrier to adoption though.
Comparing languages by popularity is generally meaningless. Python went from relative obscurity to being hailed as the ‘number one’ language to learn as data science became a huge trend. There has been an explosion of languages over the last decade and so what becomes and remains ‘popular’ is very unclear.
Promoting technology based on popularity requires a serious amount of financial investment. When you have Microsoft, Facebook, Google and many other companies investing billions in languages, then popularity can come more readily (although not guaranteed, e.g. Dart).