Sorry to have to ask, but why choose to work at a place that doesn't use tools that you like, or does not give you the autonomy to use your best skills?
Because life is about tradeoffs. Optimising for criterion A mean sacrificing the opportunity to optimise for criterion B. And there are far more important criteria than programming languages for which to optimise choice of employer.
Do your coworkers never have to go in and maintain your code? What about after you leave? Do you not have to pull request the code before it's merged in? At the end of the day it IS just a jar, but that ignores all the non-runtime aspects of coding.
> Do your coworkers never have to go in and maintain your code? What about after you leave?
I wrote an extension to our core app that is needed by 2 customers. Someone might need to touch it again one day, but it's more likely that a new spec will demand new engineering for a new solution in the future, at which point the most favorable technology will be used. That goes for me or the next person.
> Do you not have to pull request the code before it's merged in?
No. I'm a full-time employee and a core committer. We already have extensions in Java, Groovy, (very limited, nearly dead experiment) Jython, and now Clojure. Technically my extension is Java and it is a thin wrapper to a Clojure library.
> At the end of the day it IS just a jar, but that ignores all the non-runtime aspects of coding.
They are de minimis in this case. It survived review with nominal eyebrows raised. It's a Java shop but they're familiar with the family of other JVM languages.
Even if you don't write Clojure code in your project, the Clojure REPL can be used to experiment with Java code in the same way the Groovy or Scala REPLs can.
