If that’s your concern you don’t need to be concerned with any technical quality of any language. Just count job postings by language and learn the one with the highest value.
The question is appeal to whom. Large employers want you to learn popular languages so that you're a commodity in a liquid market. But that's not a signal of economic value; it's the reverse. It's saying "I'm entirely replaceable."
What you can predict is that those employers for whom clojure (or any other minority language) is either acceptable or preferred are deciding that they don't want commodity, low-margin employees. It's a signal that they prefer not to buy the mass-market offering, and ought to expect to pay a premium.
What that means is that if your only way of finding jobs is to be one of the mass-market crowd, you're unlikely to find a premium-paying employer because that's not where they're looking.
its not large employers only. you need a steady stream and large enough pool of candidates for any size of a business.
if you limit yourself to a tiny almost invisible slice you are betting your business on finding candidates and relying on that small pool of talent. employees come and go and you would have to deal with this issue constantly.
Yes not only large employers, but it's easiest to think in those terms.
And it's only true that "employees come and go" is a problem if 1. you assume turnover has to be high, and 2. you don't know where to find qualified people you need. Turnover will be high if you assume you need commodity devs and don't, for instance, invest in their skills (like teaching them minority languages if that's your thing).
If I see a company hiring for "python developers" or "java developers" at this point I absolutely know what sort of problems their codebases will have, because they're in the commodity market and treating development as a cost centre to be minimised. Which leads to lower salaries, which drives higher turnover.
We've had Python devs for over 10 years and a few of them decided to move to another country. To find someone to replace them and from even a smaller pool of talents is just setting ourselves up for failure.
Jobs and market have a huge factor of
1. politics
2. synergy
Almost the only reason that python is popular and people do everything with it is synergy. The only reason that javascript is eating the world and any web dev has to know it, and people do everything with it is synergy.
A big reason for C# to have popularity is because it's for Microsoft (politics).
These are just some examples. Being used doesn't mean anything.
There were and still are a ton of PHP jobs. You tell me, is it because PHP is a great language and solves our problems? No, because it has synergy.
If you're good enough, you can pretty much choose what language/framework you work in.
you forgot the other side of the market which are the employers who have a business to run and they cannot limit their hiring to a small talent pool because advocates for that esoteric language said its da bomb.
