Notes.

The newsletter is a bit late this week, life’s been full of weddings and Christmas preparations. I hope your holiday preparations are going well too.

-main

• RIP Anthony Grimes. I didn’t know Anthony personally, but he had a big influence in the Clojure community. There is a fundraiser for his family at GoFundMe.
• The annual Clojure Survey is out. It closes on December 23rd. If the future of Clojure is important to you (and if it’s not, why are you reading this newsletter?), you should take a few minutes to fill it out.
• Timothy Pratley writes about the hallway track at Clojure Conj 2016, and gives a survey of what people are using Clojure for.
• I’m really excited for ClojureScript Externs Inference. This builds on the work Maria Geller did last summer in her Google Summer of Code work
• One Weird Trick to Become a Clojure Expert
• Data Science up and down the Ladder of Abstraction which references one of my all time favourite articles: Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction by Bret Victor.
• The ClojureX videos are out
• A good talk on C, Crypto and Clojure by lvh

Libraries & Books.

• The Clojure Standard Library is a new book by Renzo Borgatti and published by Manning. It’s in early access now, and expected to come out in Spring 2018. It looks like a massive but valuable undertaking.
• Continuing this year’s trend of failure/retry handling libraries, comes an entry from Max Penet: Checkmate. 
• datalog-rules: Utilities for managing Datalog rulesets from Clojure.
• docker-fixture: Docker containers as clojure.test fixtures [Ed: 😱]
• Martin Klepsch has a new release of Derivatives out. It creates trees of derived values (similar to re-frame), but without a global db state.

People are worried about Types. ?

• Allen Rohner gave a talk on Spectrum, a static ’typing’ library for Clojure.Spec at ClojureConj
• Parsing with clojure.spec for the Advent of Code
• Brandon Bloom and Gary Fredericks had a good discussion on Spec and versioning on Clojurians Slack.

Foundations.

• What Future Java Might Look Like
• Java 9, OSGi, and the Future of Modularity
• A JSR to broaden the membership of the Java Community Process

Tools.

• A Challenger Approaches! Clojure-Kit is a new Clojure plugin for IntelliJ. It’s still quite new, but looks like it has a lot of features already (structural editing, lein/boot support, REPLs, dataflow).
• Pimping Gorilla REPL with React and ClojureScript
• Clojure Jobs Resources

Learning.

• Game development with Clojure/ClojureScript
• Writing a Halite Bot in Clojure
• An alternative to mocking with var redefinition

Misc.

Juxt XT16 looks like it was a lot of fun.