Intro.

The biggest Clojure news this week was the release of Clojure 1.9.0-alpha8. We’re starting to investigate spec at work, and things are looking good so far. When I first saw spec, it made some choices that I thought were “wrong”. I’ve come around on those in the last few weeks as I’ve seen how they could have prevented some issues we had when using schema. Turns out Rich knows what he’s doing 😄.

Articles.

• What the Hell is Symbolic Computation? by Steve Losh. This gets down into the nitty gritty of how a Lisp REPLs, and how quoting and symbols work. I found this really interesting.

Discussions.

• Proposal: Asynchronous Ring, State of Ring CPS, and the Reddit discussion are all worth reading if you’re interested in asynchronous Ring. Paul deGrandis in particular had some really good perspective on how Pedestal Interceptors work, and the benefits of the Pedestal approach.
• Colin Fleming’s comments around nil handling on the Reddit discussion for How many of Java’s horrors are addressed by Clojure?

Libraries & Books.

• diehard is a Clojure wrapper over Failsafe. It’s designed for handling failures and retrying in your programs. Apart from what it does, I just like the name.
• Immutant 2.1.5 was released, with same day support for the newly released JBoss EAP 7.
• Arachne development update and schedule
• Nikita Prokopov has backported spec to Clojure 1.8 in clojure-future-spec.

People are worried about Types.

• Bruce Hauman has valiantly created a 1,000 line spec for ClojureScript compiler options which including validation for complex co-dependencies.
• How Elm Slays a UI Antipattern from the always excellent Kris Jenkins.
• Property-Based Testing with Clojure and Datomic, part 2
• 5 Differences between clojure.spec and Schema

Foundations.

• Know thy Java Object Memory Layout
• Transactional data structure libraries

Learning.

• Tim Baldridge has moved his excellent series of Clojure videos from Pivotshare to Youtube. Some are free, and some are paid. They’re all well worth watching for expert level insight into core.async, transducers and other advanced Clojure topics. 2019 Update: This has moved back to Pivotshare due to Youtube shutting down paid channels.

Misc.

• Kyle Kingsbury breaks a database based on Elasticsearch, news at 11.