I feel your pain but from a different angle, I am trying to find a job right now that is clojure and either its on site in SFO (No thanks) or in London. Breaking in seems hard enough and then hearing stories like this don't instill confidence. I really hate it because going back to dealing with OO is actually painful, it just seems like it's building up a whole big skeleton for little benefit.
I feel the same with not having Clojure around at work anymore after I quit my last job.
That said, at the new place that uses Rails we instilled a culture of avoiding stateful updates, preferring hash structures to mountains of object definitions, and use of functional transforms as much as possible.
Then we needed to ramp up to the next level and chose the JVM for writing concurrent code. But we started with Scala as something that has functional concepts baked in since it's "easier to hire for". Not the same, but there are other paths to dealing with lack of Clojure.
Oh, and the Scala only makes up for part of losing Clojure because we actually use it in a similar way to Clojure plus a bajillion type declarations. With the occasional workaround for a compiler bug (I've encountered three in the past 6 months).
How you deal with two separate tech stacks in single product? I try to shift from Ruby (on Rails) to to Clojure. But I feel hard to rewrite mountains of RoR convieniece and habits into Clojure (1.day.ago, named routes, ActiveMailer, encrypted cookie etc). As I am also partially Java guy, I came to conclusion that migration of project into JRuby and then embedding Clojure parts gradually might ease the transition.
I try to shift from Ruby (on Rails) to to Clojure. But I feel hard to rewrite mountains of RoR convieniece and habits into Clojure (1.day.ago, named routes, ActiveMailer, encrypted cookie etc).
This seems like a bad idea from a business value perspective. What value is delivered by translating mountains of code? Probably none, being honest.
As I am also partially Java guy, I came to conclusion that migration of project into JRuby and then embedding Clojure parts gradually might ease the transition.
Don't transition everything, giant waste of time. Run ruby/rails on jruby, then package the core Clojure logic up as a library, and call into it from rails where needed. Clojure is your core logic, ruby/rails is the web front end to that core.
Dealing with JRuby will just be that much more to manage, but will introduce the JVM in a single app. You don't have to do everything at once if you break into separate apps/boxes/services.
We're growing to the point of needing a few distinct components after building a Rails monolith that already had very strong internal boundaries. As we split out different parts to run on different machines, they will either get an immediate re-write, or eventual re-write from behind the service interface.
