For a startup, you don't need "many". You need a handful. If I'm trying to hire three programmers and they are make-or-break for the success of my company, I'd much rather be picky. I'll leave the hordes of generic Java coders to the people who have to hire a hundred at once.
You are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding good engineers who you can work with. Sprinkling clojure in your job postings isn't magic. A world of difference exists between people saying "thats cool" and "I will work for you for 50% under market rates".
> Sprinkling clojure in your job postings isn't magic.
If you're trying to find these developers through job postings I don't think you're going to have much success.
Your target market is developers passionate about Clojure so if you want to hire those you need to go to where they are; which most likely isn't Monsterboard.
I have no doubt about a tenfold variance across different people, but I'm highly skeptical of any claims that a particular language will make you 10 times more productive over the long haul.
People always doubt this, and then new languages always come along that improve developer efficiency. It was a lot easier to write a program in C than assembler, Perl than C, and Python than Perl, at least for me. I've seen some amazingly sweet code in some of the functional languages like Clojure and Haskell. My current main language is Ruby, and while it is not perfect, I would never trade it as a general-purpose language for assembly. I'm sure I'm well over 10x more effective than I would be if it was all assembly, all the time -- assuming I wasn't allowed to invent a new language as part of the solution.
So why doubt this same thing can happen again? It's like doubting that MD5 will ever be broken, or questioning whether something like Roman numerals can be improved upon. Of course it can, and will.
Clojure is not a 10x improve to over java, full stop. It's not even close, and I've done a project at my day job in clojure, it's my favorite language.
