A Tale of Three Clojures

By Alys Brooks

Recently, I was helping a coworker debug an issue with loading a Clojure dependency from a Git repository. (If you don’t know you can do this; it’s very handy. Here’s a guide.) I realized that there were really two Clojures at play: the Clojure that clojure was running to generate the classpath and the Clojure that was used by the actual Clojure program.

Taking a step back, there are really three things we might mean when we say “Clojure”:

  • The language of Clojure, as in “Clojure has immutable data structures.”
  • The commandline tool, as in clj
  • The dependency of Clojure, as in [org.clojure/clojure "1.10.1"]

Let’s disambiguate these three different Clojures and learn a little about how Clojure works under the hood along the way.

Clojure the language

Usually when we’re talking about “Clojure,” we’re talking about the language, like when we say things like “Clojure is a Lisp” or “Clojure has multiple lock-free concurrency abstractions.”

But what about statements about stack traces, like “If I see another impenetrable Clojure stack trace today, I’m going to give up programming for good and become a lighthouse operator off the coast of Nova Scotia”? Stack traces have a lot to do with the language—they include the namespace and function for each line of the file in Clojure. However, they also have a lot to do with the implementation. Stack traces of alternate implementations of Clojure, like Clojurescript, reflect their host platform and the resulting decisions the implementers made. For the JVM version of Clojure, the implementation consists of classes (usually bundled as a JAR) specified on the classpath, which we’ll discuss in the final section of this article.

For once, we’re not going to say much about Clojure the language. To actually use Clojure, we need to run it. That’s usually accomplished with Leiningen, Boot, or our next topic, the Clojure CLI tool.

Clojure the CLI tool

Officially, the clojure CLI tool’s purpose is to “declare dependencies, assemble classpaths, and launch Clojure programs with data.”

clojure serves a similar role as interpreters and runtimes like python, node, and java, but as the “with data” above hinted, it does so in a particularly Clojure-y way.

To help understand what it does, let’s grab the JAR, go back in time and start Clojure manually, like Clojure.org recommended in 2008:


java -cp clojure.jar clojure.lang.Repl

One does not simply load a single JAR in the very latest versions because of the new dependency on clojure.spec.alpha, but it does work for Clojure 1.8.0 and earlier versions. If you have it locally, you can update the above command to:


java -cp ~/.m2/repository/org/clojure/clojure/1.8.0/clojure-1.8.0.jar clojure.lang.Repl

What does this do? Well, it starts up a JVM, telling it that we want to load a JAR (basically a zip file of classes), and run the clojure.lang.Repl class from it. All other classes it needs are either in the JAR or are included with the JVM itself.

Say, what if you want to run an actual Clojure program? Simply call:


java -cp clojure.jar clojure.lang.Script script.clj

Easy! If we can start Clojure and run programs in compact one-liners, what’s the point of the clojure CLI tool? Well, if you have any sort of dependencies beyond Clojure itself, manually determining what goes after -cp quickly becomes challenging.

Even before the clojure CLI tool, Leiningen or Boot, people used Java tools to help them manage the classpath. When I asked on Clojurians slack, a few people commented that they used either ant or a Maven plugin. According to Alex Miller, the Clojure Core team still uses Maven plus clojure-maven-plugin. However, once introduced, Leiningen swept the Clojure world. The 2012 State of Clojure survey, the first that asked about build tooling, showed that 95 percent of users used Leiningen. Fast-forward to 2021, and Leiningen is now down to 75 percent, Maven is down to 5 percent, and Ant isn’t even on the list anymore (although two people mentioned it under Other).

Thus, the most important job of clojure (as well as Leiningen and Boot) is generating the part of the Java invocation that comes right after -cp. This illustrates a flaw in my comparison of clojure to python or java. While it is true that a Clojure programmer uses clojure to start a Clojure program in the same way she uses python to run a Python script or java to run a compiled Java program, clojure the CLI tool is a launcher (and with tools.build, a build tool)—it isn’t a runtime or interpreter in itself. (That’s java, plus the core language classes in that clojure.jar we saw above.)

How does it know what dependencies to add to the classpath? Because it’s a Clojure tool, the dependencies are stored in the EDN format, which is basically just the parts of Clojure syntax that are useful for specifying data. (Because of the close correspondence between data and code in Lisps, the “parts of Clojure syntax that are useful for specifying data” turns out to be…most of it.) For example, [1 2 3] is valid EDN. (vector 1 2 3) is also valid EDN, but it won’t be evaluated. In other words, it will be read as a list containing the symbol vector followed by the numbers 1, 2, and 3, but the vector symbol won’t be looked up and called, so it will remain a list. Of course, once read, you can pass the list to eval yourself (resulting in [1 2 3]) or do whatever else you want to with it.

While we’re on the topic, we can also look at the difference between clojure and clj. clj is actually a script rather than a binary, so we can look at it directly in a text editor. Here’s what it contains on my system:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

if type -p rlwrap >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  exec rlwrap -r -q '\"' -b "(){}[],^%#@\";:'" clojure "$@"
else
  echo "Please install rlwrap for command editing or use \"clojure\" instead."
  exit 1
fi

If rlwrap exists, it runs it with a few Clojure-specific settings, like indicating that parentheses are not part of words but separate them. If rlwrap doesn’t exist, it echoes a message telling the user to install it. In short, clj simply wraps clojure with rlwrap, which adds completion, editing, and command history.

So, what’s in that Clojure.jar that clojure loads for us? That brings us to the final of the three Clojures. Clojure the Dependency.

Clojure the Dependency

A lot of Clojure projects, whether they use the Clojure CLI tool (sometimes referred to by its main library, tools.deps), Leiningen, or Boot, include a reference to Clojure itself as a dependency. This Clojure dependency is not the same as the Clojure standard library (although it certainly includes it). More on that later.

However, all three of these tools are themselves written in Clojure, so how does this work?

Here’s an abbreviated version of the process when the user runs clj:

  1. Runs the Clojure CLI tool once to generate the proper classpath. On this run, the Clojure CLI tool’s classpath consists of a hard-coded JAR that contains the classes that make up clojure as well as its dependencies.
  2. Runs the Clojure CLI tool again with the new classpath in order to actually provide the REPL or run the application.

This means java actually gets started twice, unless it can use a cached classpath and skip step 1.

I mentioned earlier that the Clojure dependency is more than the standard library. Let’s open that early Clojure JAR from 2008 to see what’s inside. It is an archive containing over 200 files, so we won’t look at them all. Here are some broad categories of what’s inside:

  • Actual machinery of the language. For example, lang/LispReader.class is the reader, which takes the characters and puts them into a data structure—the lists Lisp is so famous for. (The reader is responsible for the Read part of Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop (REPL).)

  • Persistent data structure implementations. For example, lang/PersistentArrayMap.class is one of the classes used for hash maps.
  • Various interfaces, like clojure/lang/ISeq.class, which is the interface all seqs implement.

  • Core libraries, like clojure/set/set.clj, which contains the clojure.set namespace.

What does that mean in practice? One example is the addition of namespace map syntax, which was added in Clojure 1.9. In order for this to work, you need a copy of lang/LispReader.class that supports this syntax. Running clojure -Sdeps '{:deps {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.10.1"}}}' -e "(keys #::{:a 1, :b 2})" succeeds, while clojure -Sdeps '{:deps {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.8.0"}}}' -e "(keys #::{:a 1, :b 2})" fails. Syntax changes like this are actually pretty rare because it’s easy to extend Clojure without adding syntax. More often, the Clojure core team adds features to the core libraries. For example, Clojure 1.9 also added a number of predicates, like boolean? and int?, in order to support the new spec library.

To tie it all together, in order to take advantage of the new namespace map syntax added to the language or the new predicates added to the core library in Clojure 1.9, you need to specify the Clojure 1.9 dependency to the clojure CLI tool.

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Funding

A big shout goes out to two of our clients, Nextjournal and Pitch. They have made a lot of this work possible either by funding projects directly, or by dogfooding our tools and libraries and giving us an opportunity to improve them. Thank you both for investing in this great ecosystem.

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This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

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This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

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This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Here’s a great life hack, to peal ginger don’t use a knife, use a spoon. I’m not kidding. Just scrape off the peal with the tip of the spoon, it’s almost too easy.

Here’s a Clojure + Emacs life hack:

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This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Something I’m pretty good at is coming up with random hacks. The thing where you’re like “hey how about we plug this thing into that thing” and everyone says “why would you do that that’s a terrible idea” and I’m like (mario voice) “let’s a go”.

And sometimes the result is not entirely useless. Like this little oneliner I came up with yesterday, using Babashka to “convert” a project.clj into a deps.edn.

Advent 2019 part 17, trace! and untrace!

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Here’s a little REPL helper that you may like.

(defn trace! [v]
  (let [m    (meta v)
        n    (symbol (str (ns-name (:ns m))) (str (:name m)))
        orig (:trace/orig m @v)]
    (alter-var-root v (constantly (fn [& args]
                                    (prn (cons n args))
                                    (apply orig args))))
    (alter-meta! v assoc :trace/orig orig)))

(defn untrace! [v]
  (when-let [orig (:trace/orig (meta v))]
    (alter-var-root v (constantly orig))
    (alter-meta! v dissoc :trace/orig)))

Advent 2019 part 16, Coffee Grinders

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Over the last year or so I’ve found myself using some variations on a certain pattern when modelling processes in Clojure. It’s kind of like a event loop, but adapted to the functional, immutable nature of Clojure. For lack of a better name I’m calling these coffee grinders. (The analogy doesn’t even really work but the kid needs to have a name.)

Since I saw Avdi Grimm’s OOPS Keynote at Keep Ruby Weird last year I’ve been thinking a lot about the transaction vs process dichotomy. Avdi talks about the “Transactional Fallacy” from around 15:25. From his slides:

Advent 2019 part 15, jcmd and jstack

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Two shell commands anyone using JVM languages should be familiar with are jcmd and jstack. They are probably already available on your system, as they come bundled with the JDK. Try it out, run jcmd in a terminal.

This is what the result might look like

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This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

When I started consulting for Nextjournal I helped them out a lot with tooling and testing. Their data model is fairly complex, which made it hard to do setup in tests. I created a factory based approach for them, which has served the team well ever since.

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Advent 2019 part 12, Pairing in the Cloud with Tmux

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

I’m a strong believer in pair programming. It can be intense and exhausting, and its a skill you need to learn and get good at, but it’s extremely valuable. It improves knowledge sharing, prevents mistakes, and helps people to stay on track to make sure they are building the right thing, which is arguably one of the hardest aspects of our job.

But Gaiwan is a remote-first company. We are spread out across Germany, Brazil, Italy, and work with clients as far away as Singapore and Hong Kong, so we need good ways to pair remotely. For this we need a tool that is

Advent 2019 part 11, Integrant in Practice

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

I’ve been a fan of Integrant pretty much ever since it came out. For me there is still nothing that can rival it.

The recently released clip by the folks from Juxt does deserve an honorable mention. It has an interesting alternative approach which some may prefer, but it does not resonate with me. I prefer my system configuration to be just data, rather than code wrapped in data.

Advent 2019 part 10, Hillcharts with Firebase and Shadow-cljs

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Recently I led a workshop for a client to help them improve their development process, and we talked a lot about Shape Up, a book released by Basecamp earlier this year that talks about their process. You can read it for free on-line, and I can very much recommend doing so. It’s not a long read and there are a ton of good ideas in there.

One of these ideas has also become a feature in Basecamp, namely hill charts. These provide a great way to communicate what stage a piece of work is in. Are you still going uphill, figuring things out and discovering new work, or are you going downhill, where it’s mostly clear what things will look like, and you’re just executing what you discovered?

Advent 2019 part 9, Dynamic Vars in ClojureScript

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Clojure has this great feature called Dynamic Vars, it lets you create variables which can be dynamically bound, rather than lexically. Lexical (from Ancient Greek λέξις (léxis) word) in this case means “according to how it is written”. let bindings for instance are lexical.

(defn hello [x]
  (str "hello " x))

(defn greetings []
  (str "greetings" foo)) ;; *error*

(let [foo 123]
  (hello foo)
  (greetings))

Advent 2019 part 8, Everything is (not) a pipe

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

I’ve always been a big UNIX fan. I can hold my own in a shell script, and I really like the philosophy of simple tools working on a uniform IO abstraction. Uniform abstractions are a huge enabler in heterogenous systems. Just think of Uniform Resource Locators and Identifier (URLs/URIs), one of the cornerstones of the web as we know it.

Unfortunately since coming to Clojure I feel like I’ve lost of some of that power. I’m usually developing against a Clojure process running inside (or at least connected to) my trusty editor, and the terminal plays second fiddle. How do I pipe things into or out of that?

Advent 2019 part 7, Do that doto

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

doto is a bit of an oddball in the Clojure repertoire, because Clojure is a functional language that emphasizes pure functions and immutabilty, and doto only makes sense when dealing with side effects.

To recap, doto takes a value and a number of function or method call forms. It executes each form, passing the value in as the first argument. At the end of the ride it returns the original value.

Advent 2019 part 6, A small idiom

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

As an avid tea drinker I’ve been poring (pouring?) over this catalog of teas.

(def teas [{:name "Dongding"
            :type :oolong}
           {:name "Longjing"
            :type :green}
           {:name "Baozhong"
            :type :oolong}
           {:name "Taiwan no. 18"
            :type :black}
           {:name "Dayuling"
            :type :oolong}
           {:name "Biluochun"
            :type :green}])

Advent 2019 part 5, Clojure in the shell

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

I already showed you netcat, and how it combines perfectly with socket REPLs. But what if all you have is an nREPL connection? Then you use rep

$ rep '(clojure.tools.namespace.repl/refresh)'
:reloading ()
:ok

Advent 2019 part 4, A useful idiom

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Here’s a little Clojure idiom that never fails to bring me joy.

(into {} (map (juxt key val)) m)

Advent 2019 part 3, `every-pred` and `some-fn`

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Ah clojure.core, it’s like an all you can eat hot-pot. Just when you think you’ve scooped up all it has to offer, you discover another small but delicious delicacy floating in the spicy broth.

In exactly the same way I recently became aware of two functions that until now had only existed on the periphery of my awareness. I’ve since enjoyed using them on several occasions, and keep finding uses for them.

Advent 2019 part 2, Piping hot network sockets with Netcat

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Part of what I want to do in this series is simply point at some of the useful tools and libraries I discovered in the past year. I’ve adopted a few tools for doing network stuff on the command line which I’ll show you in another post. First though we’ll look at a classic: netcat!

I’ve been using netcat for years, it’s such a great tool. It simply sets up a TCP connection and connects it to STDIN/STDOUT. Pretty straightforward. I’ve been using it more and more though because of Clojure’s socket REPL.

Advent 2019 part 1, Clojure Vocab: to Reify

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

An interesting aspect of the Clojure community, for better or for worse, is that it forms a kind of linguistic bubble. We use certain words that aren’t particularly common in daily speech, like “accretion”, or use innocuous little words to refer to something very specific. Even a simple word like “simple” is no longer that simple.

We can thank Rich Hickey for this. He seems to care a great deal about language, and is very careful in picking the words he uses in his code, documentation, and in his talks.

Advent of Parens 2019

Ah, the advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas. That period of glühwein and office year-end parties.

The last couple of years I’ve taken part in the Advent of Code, a series of programming puzzles posted daily. They’re generally fun to do and wrapped in a nice narrative. They also as the days progress start taking up way too much of my time, so this year I won’t be partaking in Advent of Code, instead I’m trying something new.

From the first to the 24th of December I challenge myself to write a single small blog post every day. If my friend Sarah Mirk can do a daily zine for a whole year, surely I can muster a few daily paragraphs for four weeks.

Lambda Island Streaming Live this Thursday and Friday

We are definitely back from holidays, and to demonstrate that we’re not just doing one but two live stream events!

Felipe and Arne pairing

Thursday 5 September, 13:00 to 15:00 UTC

Fork This Conference

Last weekend Heart of Clojure took place in Leuven, Belgium. As one of the core organizers it was extremely gratifying to see this event come to life. We started with a vision of a particular type of event we wanted to create, and I feel like we delivered on all fronts.

For an impression of what it was like you can check out Malwine’s comic summary, or Manuel’s blog post.

It seems people had a good time, and a lot of people are already asking about the next edition. However we don’t intend to make this a yearly recurring conference. We might be back in two years, maybe with another Heart of Clojure, maybe with something else. We need to think about that.

Advice to My Younger Self

When I was 16 I was visited by a man who said he had come from the future. He had traveled twenty years back to 1999 to sit down with me and have a chat.

We talked for an hour or so, and in the end he gave me a few pieces of advice. I have lived by these and they have served me well, and now I dispense this advice to you.

Become allergic to The Churn

ClojureScript logging with goog.log

This post explores goog.log, and builds an idiomatic ClojureScript wrapper, with support for cljs-devtools, cross-platform logging (by being API-compatible with Pedestal Log), and logging in production.

This deep dive into GCL’s logging functionality was inspired by work done with Nextjournal, whose support greatly helped in putting this library together.

Clojure’s standard library isn’t as “batteries included” as, say, Python. This is because Clojure and ClojureScript are hosted languages. They rely on a host platform to provide the lower level runtime functionality, which also allows them to tap into the host language’s standard library and ecosystem. That’s your batteries right there.

The Art of Tree Shaping with Clojure Zippers

This is a talk I did for the “Den of Clojure” meetup in Denver, Colorado. Enjoy!

Captions (subtitles) are available, and you can find the transcript below, as well as slides over here.

For comments and discussion please refer to this post on r/Clojure.

Test Wars: A New Hope

Yesterday was the first day for me on a new job, thanks to Clojurists Together I will be able to dedicate the coming three months to improving Kaocha, a next generation test runner for Clojure.

A number of projects applied for grants this quarter, some much more established than Kaocha. Clojurists Together has been asking people through their surveys if it would be cool to also fund “speculative” projects, and it seems people agreed.

I am extremely grateful for this opportunity. I hope to demonstrate in the coming months that Kaocha holds a lot of potential, and to deliver some of that potential in the form of a tool people love to use.

Two Years of Lambda Island, A Healthy Pace and Things to Come

It’s been just over two years since Lambda Island first launched, and just like last year I’d like to give you all an update about what’s been happening, where we are, and where things are going.

To recap: the first year was rough. I’d been self-employed for nearly a decade, but I’d always done stable contracting work, which provided a steady stream of income, and made it easy for me to unplug at the end of the day.

Lambda Island was, as the Dutch expression goes, “a different pair of sleeves”. I really underestimated what switching to a one-man product business in a niche market would mean, and within months I was struggling with symptoms of burnout, so most of year one was characterised by trying to keep things going and stay afloat financially, while looking after myself and trying to get back to a good place, physically and mentally.

D3 and ClojureScript

This is a guest post by Joanne Cheng (twitter), a freelance software engineer and visualization consultant based in Denver, Colorado. She has taught workshops and spoken at conferences about visualizing data with D3. Turns out ClojureScript and D3 are a great fit, in this post she’ll show you how to create your own visualization using the power of D3 and the elegance of ClojureScript.

I use D3.js for drawing custom data visualizations. I love using the library, but I wanted to try one of the several compile to JavaScript options, and I decided to look into ClojureScript. It ended up working out well for me, so I’m going to show you how I created a D3.js visualization using ClojureScript!

What we’re visualizing

Reloading Woes

Update: seems Stuart Sierra’s blog post has dropped off the internet. I’ve updated the link to refer to the Wayback Machine’s version instead.

Setting the Stage

When doing client work I put a lot of emphasis on tooling and workflow. By coaching people on their workflow, and by making sure the tooling is there to support it, a team can become many times more effective and productive.

The Bare Minimum, or Making Mayonnaise with Clojure

Making Mayonnaise

Imagine you have a grandfather who’s great at making mayonnaise. He’s been making mayonnaise since before the war, and the result is truly excellent. What’s more, he does this with a good old fashioned whisk. He’s kept his right arm in shape throughout decades just by beating those eggs and oil and vinegar.

Now he’s bought himself a handheld electric mixer after hearing his friend rave about hers, but after a few tries he gives up and goes back to his whisk. He says he just can’t get the same result. This seems slightly odd, so the next time you go over you ask him to show you how he uses the mixer.

Clojure Gotchas: "contains?" and Associative Collections

When learning a programming language we rarely read the reference documentation front to back. Instead someone might follow some tutorials, and look at sample code, until they’re confident enough to start a little project for practice.

From that point on the learning process is largely “just in time”, looking up exactly the things you need to perform the task at hand. As this goes on you might start to recognize some patterns, some internal logic that allows you to “intuit” how one part of the language works, based on experience with another part.

Developing this “intuition” — understanding this internal logic — is key to using a language effectively, but occasionally our intuition will be off. Some things are simply not obvious, unless someone has explained them to us. In this post I will look at something that frequently trips people up, and attempt to explain the underlying reasoning.

Dates in Clojure: Making Sense of the Mess

Update 2018-11-27: while most of this article is still relevant, I no longer recommend using JodaTime as the main date/time representation for new projects. Even existing projects that aren’t too invested in JodaTime/clj-time should consider migrating to java.time and clojure.java-time across the board.

Update 2 2019-05-29: Also check out the talk Cross Platform DateTime Awesomeness by Henry Widd, given at Clojure/north 2019

You can always count on human culture to make programming messy. To find out if a person is a programmer just have them say “encodings” or “timezones” and watch their face.

Clojure Gotchas: Surrogate Pairs

tl;dr: both Java and JavaScript have trouble dealing with unicode characters from Supplementary Planes, like emoji 😱💣.

Today I started working on the next feature of lambdaisland/uri, URI normalization. I worked test-first, you’ll get to see how that went in the next Lambda Island episode.

One of the design goals for this library is to have 100% parity between Clojure and ClojureScript. Learn once, use anywhere. The code is all written in .cljc files, so it can be treated as either Clojure or ClojureScript. Only where necessary am I using a small amount of reader conditionals.

Simple and Happy; is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?

The past week or so a lot of discussion and introspection has been happening in the Clojure community. Eric Normand responded to my one year Lambda Island post with some reflections on the size and growth of the community.

And then Zack Maril lamented on Twitter: “I’m calling it, clojure’s dying more than it is growing”. This sparked a mega-thread, which was still raging four days later. A parallel discussion thread formed on Reddit. Someone asked if their were any Clojure failure stories. They were pointed at this talk from RubyConf 2016, which seemed to hit a lot of people right in the feels, and sparked a subthread with a life of its own.

Meanwhile Ray, one of the hosts of the defn podcast reacted to the original tweet: “I’m calling it: Clojure is alive and well with excellent defaults for productive and sustainable software development.” This sparked another big thread.

Loading Clojure Libraries Directly From Github

Did you ever fix a bug in an open source library, and then had to wait until the maintainer released an updated version?

It’s happened to me many times, the latest one being Toucan. I had run into a limitation, and found out that there was already an open ticket. It wasn’t a big change so I decided to dive in and address it. Just a little yak shave so I could get on with my life.

Now this pull request needs to be reviewed, and merged, and eventually be released to Clojars, but ain’t nobody got time for that stuff. No sir-ee.

Lambda Island Turns One, The Story of a Rocky Ride

One year ago to date I launched Lambda Island, a service that offers high quality video tutorials on web development with Clojure and ClojureScript. It’s been quite a ride. In this post I want to look back at the past year, provide some insight into how this experience has been for me, and give you a glimpse of what the future has in store.

This story really starts in December 2015. After three years of doing contract work for Ticketsolve I decided it was time for a change. I have been self-employed for many years, but I knew that sooner or later I wanted to try my hand at selling a product, rather than selling my time.

In January and February I took some time for soul-searching, and recharging. I went to speak at RubyConf Australia, and got to hang out with some old friends around Australia and New Zealand. Once back in Berlin I got busy creating Lambda Island.

Writing Node.js scripts with ClojureScript

In the two most recent  Lambda Island episodes I covered in-depth how to create command line utilities based on Lumo, how to combine them with third party libraries, and how to deploy them to npmjs.com.

However there’s a different way to create tools with ClojureScript and distribute them through NPM, without relying on Lumo. In this blog post I want to quickly demostrate how to do just that.

To recap, Lumo is a ClojureScript environment based on Node.js, using bootstrapped (self-hosted) ClojureScript. This means the ClojureScript compiler, which is written in Clojure and runs on the JVM, is used to compile itself to JavaScript. This way the JVM is no longer needed, all you need is a JavaScript runtime to compile and run ClojureScript code, which in this case is provided by Node.js. On top of that Lumo uses nexe, so Lumo can be distributed as a single compact and fast executable binary.

Announcing lambdaisland/uri 1.0.0

I just released lambdaisland/uri, a pure Clojure/ClojureScript URI library. It is available on Github and Clojars.

This is a small piece of the code base that powers lambdaisland.com. It’s inspired by Ruby’s Addressable::URI, the most solid URI implementation I’ve seen to date, although it only offers a small part of the functionality that library offers.

It’s written in pure Clojure/ClojureScript, with only minimal use of .cljc reader conditionals to smooth over differences in regular expression syntax, and differences in core protocols. It does not rely on any URI functionality offered by the host, such as java.net.URL, so it’s usable across all current and future Clojure implementations (Clojure, ClojureScript, ClojureCLR).

re-frame Subscriptions Got Even Better

Up until recently, to use re-frame subscriptions in Reagent views, you had to use a form-2 component.

A form-2 component is a function that returns another function, which does the actual rendering of the component to hiccup. In contrast, a form-1 component renders the hiccup directly.

;; form-1
(defn todo-item [todo]
  [:div.view
   [todo-checkbox (:id todo) (:completed todo)]
   [:label {:unselectable "on"} title]
   [:button.destroy {:on-click #(dispatch [:todos/remove (:id todo)])}]])

;; form-2
(defn todo-item [todo]
  (fn [todo]
    [:div.view
     [todo-checkbox (:id todo) (:completed todo)]
     [:label {:unselectable "on"} title]
     [:button.destroy {:on-click #(dispatch [:todos/remove (:id todo)])}]]))

Game Development with Clojure/ClojureScript

This weekend it’s Ludum Dare again, the world’s longest running game jam. The idea is that, alone or with a team, you build a game in a weekend based on a certain theme.

We got a little team together here in Berlin, and so I’ve been reviewing what options there are for someone wanting to build a game in Clojure or Clojurescript.

The good news is there are plenty of options, as you’ll see from the list below. You can do desktop games, browser based games with canvas or webgl, and you can even create Unity 3D games, all from your comfortable Clojure parentheses.

Union Types with Clojure.Spec

Elm and other statically typed languages have a great feature called Union Types (also called Sum Types or Algebraic Data Types).

Here’s an example taken from Elm. Suppose your system used to represent users as integers, maybe just an auto-incrementing primary key, but then switched to UUIDs represented as strings.

To correctly model this situation, you need a way to create a type that can be either an integer or a string, that’s what union types give you.