While I agree with the boredom premise (I was also bored!), the practicality of Clojure was also very important. In fact if I were to deploy something to prod today that is FP, then I either use Scala or Clojure.
Fintech benefits from concurrency, immutability and all, so obviously there is much more nuance to "why fintech uses Clojure".
Doesn't everyone benefit from those things? I didn't follow the fintech call-out here. Is fintech really that much different from other fields? I worked in it for a couple years and the only big difference I saw is how much of a pain all the regulatory hurdles are.
Yep my phrasing was not the best :X. You might know better ("couple years"). However my anecdotal observation is that the end result is that fintech drifts FP (heavy concurrency + immutability, ledgers and all) than your "average" tech. I genuinely don't know why, maybe correctness guarantees and ledgers are just so important.
FWIW I was mostly on the compliance side, so didn't have all that much direct exposure to the transaction side of things. But from the exposure I did have, I didn't see a huge difference. A transaction is a transaction. And the transactions were at the DB layer, so I wouldn't think the atomicity primitives built into the Clojure language would be all that useful.
Like anything, the middle tier should be largely stateless anyway, so using Clojure atomicity primitives in business logic may even be an anti-pattern.
Fintech benefits from concurrency, immutability and all, so obviously there is much more nuance to "why fintech uses Clojure".