13 August 2021
Alex Miller
Welcome to the Clojure Deref! This is a weekly link/news roundup for the Clojure ecosystem. (@ClojureDeref RSS)
This seems like a good week to highlight some more Clojure unicorns (private companies with valuations of at least 1 billion USD). One of the largest unicorns in the world is of course Nubank($30B). A few weeks ago we highlighted Amperity ($1B), which reached this level with their latest round and back in January AppsFlyer ($1B) became a unicorn. This week we have two new Clojure-built/friendly companies joining the list - Reify Health ($2.2B) and TaxBit ($1.5B). It’s great to see people build growing and successful companies with Clojure. Are there other Clojure unicorns? Who is missing from this list?
The Deref was on vacation last week but we saw the results of the 2021 Stackoverflow survey. In 2020, Stackoverflow failed to include Clojure as an option so we were glad to see its return this week. Notably, Clojure again topped the list as the top paying technology (as it did in 2019). Additionally, Clojure was the 2nd most loved programming language. For those that filled out the survey, thanks for sharing your info!
Finally, shout out to Dmitri Sotnikov for the release of the 3rd edition of Web Development with Clojure!
This week, I’ve been working with Rich on exploring several different options for lightweight keyword aliases (the most highly ranked request in https://ask.clojure.org). We’ve now explored several possible options for this - changing the semantics of alias, creating a new kind of symbolic only alias, adding a new clause to ns, and currently we are looking at modifying :require itself, which is currently looking the most promising. More to come as we make some more syntax decisions and hopefully move this towards the 1.11 stream!
Fogus has been working lately on new update-keys and update-vals functions, also one of the top rated requests on Ask Clojure. He’s been working with Rich to refine the docstrings and semantics, and also benchmarking a variety of implementation options.
Lots of great media in the last couple week:
ClojureScript in the Age of TypeScript — David Nolen from the Emerging Tech for the Enterprise Conference
Atoms make up EVERYTHING - from Jordan Miller looking at reactive atoms in CLJS
The Humble Programmer - Eric Normand on Dijkstra’s 1972 Turing Award lecture
Apropos 2021-07-24 - developing mobile native apps
defn podcast - with Philippa Markovics
ClojureScript podcast - lvh interviewed by Jacek Schae on security
Cognitect podcast - Mike Fikes interviewed by Ghadi Shayban about maintaining ClojureScript using CLJS in web browsers and microcontrollers
tools.build - Sean Corfield
Meta Reduce 2021.1: Summer Time - Bozhidar Batsov
Clojure Journey IX - Destructuring - O. Valadares
Clojure Indentation Commas - Cameron Desautels
polylith v0.2.0-alpha10 - framework for building Clojure applications
core.cache 1.0.217 - caching library for Clojure
memoize 1.0.250 - memoization library for Clojure
consistency-clj - NEW - consistency helpers
nrepl-cljs-sci 0.0.11 - nrepl server for nodejs
clojure-lsp 2021.08.03-13.33.03 - Language Server (LSP) for Clojure - now supports babashka, can find public unused vars
contajners - NEW idiomatic, data-driven, REPL friendly clojure client for OCI container engines
neanderthal 0.43.0 - fast Clojure matrix library
aws-api - new services released: Route53 Recovery Cluster, AWS Route53 Recovery Control Config, AWS Route53 Recovery Readiness, Amazon Chime SDK Identity, and Amazon Chime SDK Messaging services
camunda-clojure-plugin - NEW Camunda Process Engine Plugin to execute Clojure Functions from Activities
datomic-cloud-backup - NEW library for creating and restoring backups of databases in Datomic Cloud
manifold 0.1.9-alpha5 - a compatibility layer for event-driven abstractions
clj-kondo 2021.08.06 - a linter for Clojure code that sparks joy
autonormal v2.0.0 - library for storing and querying graph data in a Clojure map
babashka 0.5.1 - Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting
clj-new 1.1.331 - generate new projects based on clj, Boot, or Leiningen Templates
cli4clj 1.7.9 - Create simple interactive CLIs for Clojure applications
Calva v2.0.206 - Calva is an integrated REPL powered environment for enjoyable and productive Clojure and ClojureScript development in Visual Studio Code - perf improvements
portal 0.13.0 - A clojure tool to navigate through your data - perf
whitespace-linter - NEW extensible whitespace linter
mastodon-bot - a bot for mirroring Twitter/Tumblr accounts and RSS feeds on Mastodon, reimplementing on clojure/jvm
