Notes.

I’ve been on holiday the last few weeks at the beach. It’s been nice to feel the sand between my toes and see my kids enjoy swimming in the lagoon. I’ve also got some good features on Deps finished, I’ll write more about them soon.

Lots of new releases this week, I suspect many people are taking advantage of the holidays to finish off projects.

-main

• The annual State of Clojure survey is on now until 22 January. If you’re interested enough in Clojure to read this newsletter, you should definitely be filling out the survey.
• Jonathan Boston’s best and worst Clojure code of 2018.
• Jonathan Boston also with a good post on the recent language changes to JS and how CLJS has already solved those problems, in a better way.
• And Jonathan Boston once more with how ClojureScript is not CoffeeScript.
• Clojure/north 2019 is happening on April 19-20th in Toronto. I’m looking forward to Mike Fikes, Tommi Reiman, and Rafal Dittwald’s talks. The CFP is still open until February 1, so if you’d like to speak there, get on to it.
• re-frame and the Back Button

Libraries & Books.

• kixi.stats 0.5.0 is out, with a discussion of some new functions to help with doing ‘boring data science’, and doing everything with transducers.
• Herb is a new CSS library for building UI components in ClojureScript, building on Garden. Top marks for the extensive documentation.
• calfpath is a very flexible, new Ring routing library.
• CLI-matic is a new CLI parsing tool for Clojure and works well with Graal.
• expectations for clojure.test gives you expectations style assertions but with clojure.test compatibility.

Foundations.

• A more literal foundation this week, the Software Freedom Conservancy is the fiscal sponsor of Clojars and Clojurists Together. They’re having their annual funding drive, and the next $15k of donations is matched dollar for dollar by a generous group of sponsors, including Elana Hashman. The SFC takes a small percentage of any money that Clojurists Together receives (~10% IIRC), but we are a very demanding project (lots of contracts to review, payments to make, questions to answer, e.t.c.), and require far more resources than we are contributing. We couldn’t have got to where we are without their support. I just signed up as a monthly supporter, and I’d encourage you to do so as well.

Tools.

• Speaking of Elana, here is an update on updating Leiningen and Clojure versions before the next Debian freeze. It’s important and often thankless work, but I really appreciate it. I talked with Elana a few months ago about her work, if you’re interested in learning more about this.
• Cider 0.19 (Raleigh) is out with improvements to the connection management system, and updates for Clojure 1.10’s error messages.
• New releases of tools.deps and clj are out. Notably, the way to specify a classifier on an artifact is now groupId/artifactId$classifier.
• How to get lein-test-refresh notifications when using Emacs inside a remote tmux session (!).
• The EDN Query Language looks interesting, a bit of a hybrid between GraphQL and Datomic Pull queries.
• If you want to give your security and ops teams a scare, talk to them about putting REPLs on your production deployments.
• Using Graal on a small but real Clojure application
• Nikita Prokopov has been working on Clojure syntax for Sublime Text 3.
• Liquid is a new emacs inspired text editor, written and extensible in Clojure. You can use the editor inside any JVM based program, and use any JVM based library to extend the editor.
• Floki is a JSON/EDN browser for the terminal.

Recent Developments.

• Alex Miller continues his Inside Clojure journal

Learning

• When to avoid with-redefs. I’ve definitely had some headscratching moments with with-redefs. Occasionally I run into situations where the redefed function doesn’t get replaced after the with-redefs scope has ended. If you’ve ever had this and figured out what the problem is, let me know.

Misc.

• A thread of nice looking failures from test reporters.

I’m Daniel Compton. I maintain public Maven repositories at Clojars, private ones at Deps, and help fund OSS Clojure projects (along with tons of generous members like Pitch, JUXT, Metosin, Adgoji, and Funding Circle) at Clojurists Together. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, tell your friends to sign up at therepl.net, or post a link in your company chatroom. If you’ve seen (or published) a blog post, library, or anything else Clojure/JVM related please reply to this to let me know about it.

If you’d like to support the work that I’m doing, consider signing up for a trial of Deps, a private, hosted, Maven Repository service that I run.

Thanks!