Notes.

Welcome back to The REPL! This is the first newsletter since April 2020. Lots has changed in the world since then for me and almost certainly for you as well.

When I last wrote in April 2020, I had been laid off due to the startup I was working for shutting down after failing to raise funding. Since then the world went through COVID and lockdowns, I started a new job at GitHub working on GitHub Sponsors, sold our house, bought a new one, had our first child start school, and generally have had an extremely busy 12 months.

I want to say a big thanks to everyone who helped out with leads on jobs, I really appreciated it.

Here’s some of the key developments of the last year in Clojure (as I remember them).

-main

• Probably the biggest Clojure news of the year was Cognitect getting acquired by Nubank.
• Cognitect is sponsoring dozens of Clojure developers through GitHub Sponsors.
• The State of Clojure 2021 survey results were published.
• Clojure 1.10.3 and 1.10.2 were released, including a key fix for Graal based projects.
• Nubank raised a $400M Series G round at a $25B valuation (!!)
• CircleCI raised a $100M Series F round at a $1.7B valuation and acquired Vamp
• Roam Research raised a $9M seed round at a $200M valuation
• Clojurists Together formed a foundation and held board elections.

Libraries & Books.

• re-frame hit 1.0.0 and has a new website, funded in part by Clojurists Together members.
• Metosin released Malli, data-driven schemas for Clojure and ClojureScript. This was also funded in part by Clojurists Together members.
• Chris Nuernberger (new Clojurists Together board member) released tech.ml.dataset, beating Pandas, dplyr, and Julia in performance.

Foundations.

• “We should focus on stability in every JDK release, since every JDK release is meant to be ready for production use.” - Mark Reinhold on the meaning, or not, of “LTS”.
• Ultra low pause time Garbage Collectors Shenandoah and Z are no longer experimental in JDK 15

Tools.

• CIDER 1.0 (Sofia) was released.
• There’s a new Clojure podcast Lost in Lambduhhs from Jordan Miller, interviewing Michiel Borkent.
• Michiel has released far too many great things to list them all here, but babashka, clj-kondo, and sci are all amazing tools that have improved lots this year (partly funded by Clojurists Together).
• If you were having trouble understanding all the different ways GraalVM can run your code then Java on Truffle — Going Fully Metacircular isn’t going to help matters - “GraalVM 21.0 introduces a new installable component, named espresso, which provides a JVM implementation written in Java.”
• Clojars joined the GitHub secret scanning program.
• Alex Miller wrote a guide to improving startup time in development.
• Aaron Dixon from Red Planet Labs wrote about micro-optimizing Clojure for optimal performance. Clojure, Faster
• A possible future for ClojureScript formatting in Firefox DevTools

Recent Developments.

• There is a paper from Rich about the History of Clojure as part of the History of Programming Languages IV conference.
• Fogus joined the Clojure core development team

Misc.

“It is not unusual at all to read a 20 year-old paper with a tool empirically shown to make programmers 4x faster at a task, and for the underlying idea to still be locked in academia.” - Developer Tools Can Be Magic. Instead, They Collect Dust

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 Latacora, Roam, Pitch, Nubank, Cisco, JUXT, Metosin, Solita, Adgoji, Nextjournal, Flexiana, Toyokumo, and Griffin) 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!