This tax season I got an email from IRD reminding me I had to file my return. This happens every year and is usually not a surprise. However this year, the returns were slightly different. They said:

The 31 March 2019 IIT return for {person} is due 8 July 2019.

and

The 31 March 2019 ITN return for {company} is due 8 July 2019.

I’d never heard of an IIT return or an ITN return. I searched around and couldn’t get any results on Google or IRD’s website search. However, my best guess at the acronyms is:

• IIT Return: IR3 - Individual Income Tax Return
• ITN Return: IR4 - can’t think of a good explanation for this acronym

I think IRD has renamed these in their recent system upgrades and I suspect they’ve renamed all of their returns. If you come across any other acronyms, let me know and I’ll add them here to help others out.

I’ve been working remotely for about five years full-time. Over that time I’ve talked with colleagues pretty much every work day, so being able to communicate clearly by audio has been crucial. Bad quality audio can quickly turn a good conversation into a frustrating one when you struggle to hear the speaker, or keep needing to ask them to repeat themselves. Videoconferencing is lower bandwidth than in-person communication; I’ve tried to get as good quality when videoconferencing so I can catch as much of what the other person is communicating.

I studied as a musician, and accumulated several pieces of audio gear and knowledge about working with audio which have been very useful for working remotely. A friend asked me for advice about getting some audio gear so I sent him an email. That turned into a post on our company wiki, and now I’m posting it here publicly.

In my experience, for remote videoconferencing to work well, the following things are very beneficial:

• A fast, stable, and reliable internet connection
• A quiet space free of distractions, and without too much echo
• A space you’re able to comfortably talk in during work hours
• A good microphone close to your mouth and a set of headphones - Hearing yourself echo on someone else’s call makes it hard to have a conversation.

Improving audio quality when video conferencing

Here are some tips in rough order of importance for improving audio quality when videoconferencing. You can keep going down the list with diminishing returns of audio quality, stop whenever you and/or your team is happy with the quality you’re getting.

• Get really close to the mic. It should be no more than an inch or two from your lips. Having a mic far away from your mouth makes everything else more difficult. A stand on a desk is better if it goes up to your face, having the mic at desk level will pick up lots of other noises and echoes.
• Plug your computer in with Ethernet, or make sure you have really strong Wi-Fi. I always prefer to use a cable to remove a potential weak link.
• Find a quiet room to talk in. If you can’t find a quiet room, or you are on a call with more than 3 participants, I’d recommend muting yourself when you’re not talking.
• Find a room that doesn’t echo. Clapping your hands will help you spot echo quickly. You especially want to avoid sitting in any spot where you hear ringing after a clap. Blankets, couches, other soft surfaces help deaden echo.
• Get a decent mic. You should be able to get something fine for $70-$200 USD. Your first choice is whether to use an XLR mic + USB audio interface or a USB mic. An XLR mic will last a long time, especially in office use. My mic is about 10 years old now and still running fine. I’d personally steer clear of mics with a built in USB connection. Because they combine active electronics with the mic, the electronics may break or become obsolete even when the mic is still good. However, they don’t require an extra audio interface which is one less moving part and they will still sound fine. Getting a USB mic wouldn’t be a ‘wrong’ decision, this comes down to your comfort with audio gear and how much stuff you want on your desk. Marco Arment has a good overview of mics. Microphones have different polar patterns which control where they pick sound up from. If you want to be able to play meeting audio through speakers instead of wearing headphones, then look for a mic with a cardioid polar pattern to only pickup sound from the front of the mic. Dynamic microphones are often in a cardiod pattern. Condenser microphones are often bidirectional and pick up equally well front and back, which will not work well when combined with speakers.
• If you have an audio interface or USB mic, watch that you’ve set the input levels correctly. If the gain is set too high, you will get terrible sounding digital clipping. If your interface has lights, watch them while talking loudly and make sure they don’t turn red. You can also look at the input levels on your computer and make sure they aren’t hitting the very top of the input scale as this may also indicate clipping. When in doubt, set the gain levels a little lower; video conferencing software usually has some gain leveling built-in to match you with the other speakers.
• Get a pop filter, this takes the plosives out of your speech, a mic picks these up much more than a person does.
• If you don’t get a USB mic you’ll need a separate audio interface. https://marco.org/podcasting-microphones#interfaces has some suggestions. Anything over $80 USD will be fine. You only need a 1 input audio interface, but often 2 input interfaces will be about the same price. Look for one with a USB connection, you don’t need Thunderbolt for single channel recording. USB-C and/or USB 3.0 would be ideal for longevity, but they cost a little bit more, and USB 2.0 is just fine for a single recording channel.
• Once you’ve got echo in your room under control, you can look at treating it with acoustic panels to “deaden” the room further. You can make these yourself, or purchase them from lots of places online. My office has a wooden floor, and drywall roof and walls which created lots of unpleasant echoes. The person I bought my foam panels off suggested I target ceiling/floor reflections first, I mounted four panels on my roof, and this was enough for me. Acoustic treatment is a whole science in itself and is very room dependendent, so do some research for your space.
• If you’re not able to avoid echoey or noisy room environments, then you can look at processing your sound with noise removal software. I have used SoundSource (disclosure: a friend made it) and SPL De-Verb Plus to remove room noise on the other end of calls which turned them from painful to tolerable. I also tried Krisp but didn’t get great results from it. Your mileage may vary though.
• https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/11/a-podcast-studio-for-under-100/ has more general gear tips.

A few weeks ago I got to attend and speak at Heart of Clojure. I met lots of online friends in person for the first time, and made some new ones too. I’ve thought a lot about how to describe it since then, and every time I come back to the word special.

Others have also posted their thoughts on Heart of Clojure: Fork This Conference, The people’s conference, The hallway track conference, Community with lots of heart, and A courageous conference?.

Here were some things that I think made Heart of Clojure so special. If you’re running a conference, consider stealing some of these ideas.

• There was an site which listed activities around the event. Anyone could host an activity and others could join. Having it on a website meant everyone knew what was happening around the conference. I felt like this helped Heart of Clojure feel very welcoming to all of the conference goers, especially those who were less outgoing.
• One of the nights I joined an activity for an adventurous dinner. People got split into groups of 6-8 with a reservation at a restaraunt in Leuven. This broke up friend groups and introduced me to a bunch of new people. The restaurant we went to had their own brewery, and I got to try the flavours of a beer soup, beer stew, and beer crème brûlée!
• Yulia Startsev’s talk To loosen up, to put together set the tone for the conference and captured the spirit of mixing technology and the humanities. Many of the talks and conversations referenced her talk throughout the rest of the event.
• Leuven was a perfect town to have the conference. It was large enough to have a good nightlife, but small enough that you could walk between the conference venue, the bars, restauruants, and hotels in 10-15 minutes.
• In the months before the conference, Jan Stępień paired up new speakers with more experienced speakers. This was my first conference talk, and I got paired up with Tiago Luchini. Tiago was a very experienced public speaker and gave me great feedback on my talk. Having to show someone my presentation helped me get it into shape well before the conference. I think Jan’s work here contributed to the high quality of the talks at the conference.
• I’m not a vegeterian, but I really appreciated that all of the breakfast and lunches were vegeterian. I can imagine it would have made things very easy for vegeterians. The food was delicious and healthy tasting.
• There was ample time left around the talks so that you didn’t need to choose between the ‘hallway track’ and the conference track. On the Saturday there was a siesta break between 12pm and 4pm. You could do one of the activities, take a nap, or just chat with others. I was a bit skeptical before the conference that this was going to be too long, but it worked out really well.
• The lightning talks on Saturday broke up the afternoon and left space for serendipity to strike. Connie’s talk on waffles, Vim, and building her own language captured the audience.
• On the Saturday evening after the conference ended, lots of people stayed behind to help pack down the auditorium. This made the job much easier.
• There was a large contingent of people from Berlin, and they were all incredible. Berlin feels like it has a really vibrant community, one day I’d like to visit it.

Heart of Clojure was a very special event. I can’t imagine how much work it was for Arne Brasseur, Martin Klepsch, and all of the other helpers before, during, and after the event but it paid off. Heart of Clojure felt like a very polished event, not something being put on for the first time. Thanks to everyone who organised, helped out, spoke, sponsored, and attended the conference. I hope there is another Heart of Clojure in the future, if you get a chance to go, I highly recommend it.

A few years ago I came across a Leiningen project that defined profiles for :project/dev, :profiles/dev, :project/test, and :profiles/test. It took me a little bit of digging, but eventually I discovered what was happening. This is a convention that I think originated with James Reeves. I’m reposting my issue comment here, so it can be more accessible for searchers.

If you see profiles like this in a project.clj, here is what is happening:

:dev  [:project/dev  :profiles/dev]
:test [:project/test :profiles/test]
:profiles/dev  {}
:profiles/test {}
:project/dev  { ... }
:project/test { ... }

Leiningen has a feature called Composite Profiles. On startup, if Leiningen sees a vector of keywords for a profile, it will lookup each keyword as a profile, and merge them together. For the :dev profile, Leiningen will merge the values of :project/dev and :profiles/dev.

If you want to add any custom settings or dependencies for your own use, you can place them into the :profiles/dev or :profiles/test in your ~/.lein/profiles.clj. If either of these are set in the user’s profiles.clj, they will override the empty :profiles/dev map specified in the project.clj. You need an empty map for :profiles/dev {} in the project.clj, because otherwise Leiningen will complain about a missing profile.

When I first started using Apple Music I signed up for a solo subscription. During the day, I would listen to music on my Mac, and my family would listen to music on the iPad. If we listened at the same time, we would get the error:

“Looks like you’re listening to music on another device.”

Eventually this error became too annoying and I looked at upgrading to a Family subscription. The Apple Music Family subscription allows up to six people that are part of the same Family Sharing group to play music at the same time.

It sounded like this was probably what I needed, but in all of the documentation I read, it wasn’t clear whether two devices that were logged into the same Apple ID would be able to play music at the same time. I talked with Apple’s support team and it still was unclear so I went ahead and upgraded to try it for myself.

After upgrading I tested playing on multiple devices, and it worked fine. If you have an Apple Music Family subscription, you’re able to play on multiple devices that are logged into the same Apple ID.

I’m pleased to announce the initial release of defn-spec, a library to create specs inline with your defn.

[net.danielcompton/defn-spec-alpha "0.1.0"]

A quick peek at defn-spec:

(ds/defn to-zoned-dt :- ::zoned-date-time
  [instant :- ::instant
   zone-id :- ::zone-id]
  (ZonedDateTime/ofInstant instant zone-id))

One of the features in Schema that I always appreciated was inline function schemas, using a schema.core/defn macro.

When spec was released it had many similarities to Schema, but one thing it didn’t have was a way of expressing specs inline with your function definition. Spec only supported defining function specs separately with fdef. This does have some advantages, it forces you to think carefully about changing your specs, and to be aware of possibly breaking consumers. While this is valuable, not all code is written to these constraints, and I found having fdef’s separate from the function definition had a number of downsides.

When writing Clojure, I noticed that I often resisted writing specs for functions. After thinking about it I realised that I didn’t want to duplicate information from the defn into the fdef. It’s not a huge deal, but it was enough to deter me from writing specs on code that was being heavily modified. This is a really useful time to have basic specs on your functions, so that you can catch refactorings gone wrong early.

I created defn-spec to increase the locality of the spec definitions, and to reduce the activation energy to start adding specs to your codebase. defn-spec copies the syntax (and implementation) of Schema’s defn macro. This has the advantage of adopting a proven design, familiarity for many Clojurists, and the ability to work with existing tooling that understands the Schema defn macro.

Benefits and tradeoffs

Like all things in life, defn-spec has benefits and tradeoffs:

Benefits

• Makes it easy to incrementally spec your functions. It lowers the activation energy needed to add a spec, perhaps just for a single arg or return value.
• Makes it easier to see more code on one screen.
• Makes it harder for your specs to get out of sync with the function definition, as they are linked together. Depending on how you instrument your specs, it may be possible to go quite some time before you realise that your specs are broken.
• Avoids repeating all argument names in the s/cat form.

Tradeoffs

• For some specs, particularly complex :args specs with many branches, it may be simpler to define the fdef separately. defn-spec is designed for the 80-90% of Clojure functions that have simple argument lists and return types.
• Making it easier to change specs means that it is easier to accidentally break your callers. If your fdef is defined separately, it forces you to think more about growing the spec.

This is similar to Orchestra’s defn-spec macro, but allows for optionally only speccing part of the function, and matches the well-known Schema defn syntax. Try them both out though, and see which one works best for you. defn-spec is still missing some features from the defn macro like destructuring, but they are on the roadmap to be added soon. I’m releasing this early to get feedback from other users.

defn-spec will follow Spec’s release cycle, and there will be a new set of namespaces and artifacts for spec-alpha2 and beyond. If you have features/bug reports, feel free to post them on GitHub.

Cognitect have recently released the results of their State of Clojure Survey for 2019. For the last three Clojure surveys, I have reviewed the free-form answers at the end of the survey and tried to summarise how the community is feeling. This year I’m repeating the exercise, keeping the same categories as before. If you’d like to see all of the comments, I’ve published them in rough groupings.

Some comments have been lightly edited for spelling, clarity, and brevity.

Update: Alex Miller has posted a few responses to some of the comments I highlighted below, and some suggestions for the next steps that people can take to help.

Error messages

Error messages have been a top complaint in Clojure for a long time, I think since the very first survey. CLJ-2373 introduced improvements to error messages in Clojure 1.10. A number of comments complained about error messages this year, but none of the complaints mentioned 1.10’s changes. Given that 1.10 was released on 17 December 2018, and the survey ran from 7-22 January 2019, it seems likely to me that many of the people complaining haven’t tried the latest improvement to Clojure’s error messages.

• I appreciate all the work that’s been done in improving error messages. Thanks to Alex Miller and others!
• Thanks for all of your hard work on Spec and the error messages in general (often caused by minor typos).
• 1.10 alleviates most of the problems I found with error messages. Since this was my single biggest concern I had with Clojure, I just want to say thank you for listening!
• Just give me the Clojure filename and line where the exception happened, please. I beg of you.
• Better error messages. Please!
• Great to see the improved error messages in Clojure 1.10 - it was my number one issue in all previous Clojure surveys, but not this one :-)

Spec

Spec has been around for two and half years, but is still in alpha. A number of comments referenced Rich’s recent Maybe Not talk about coming changes to Spec. It was great to see Rich putting in to words some of the problems I had felt. It feels like the community is in a transitional phase with spec, where people are still not quite sure where things are going to land.

• Clojure spec tooling would be nice! Because it’s hard to learn and visualize—and it’s not obvious how to integrate it with normal deftest tests. It has a massive amount of IDE integration potential though.
• I’d really love spec to feel a little more complete. … I’ve got a lot of love for spec as a project and use it heavily at work, but I feel it’s shadowed at the moment by some ambiguity about what changes might be on the way.
• Spec has great potential, but really bad UX. If you are new to Clojure it’s very hard to figure out what’s wrong. Spec made Clojure errors worse.
• Spec should have better tool integration and more static analysis facilities.
• Really excited to see the direction spec is heading, can’t wait to see the next iteration.
• Thank you again, for all that you have given to us. Looking forward to the improvements in spec from “Maybe Not?”! I am certainly feeling the pain points they address, and currently work around them by generating heaps of variations on essentially the same spec per fdef.
• I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it always felt a bit awkward to use specs and had to juggle the spec and what the spec meant at a particular point in time during the flow of my software. Thanks Mr. Hickey for the presentation during Conj, it finally makes sense! I’m looking forward to the next iteration of spec.

Docs

Documentation has continued to be a sore spot for beginners. API docstrings were often cited as being too hard to understand, instead people preferred to see examples at clojuredocs.org. The documentation at clojure.org has grown this year with a number of great guides added, particularly Programming at the REPL.

• Concerning docs, I’m seldom able to really make use of the Clojure API docs. Since examples help me more to understand what a function does, I rely more often upon the examples provided by the community at clojuredocs. However, the quality of the examples vary and it would be helpful if there was a set of curated examples.
• Clojure is great, but the main website, docs, examples and tutorials are not good. I would invest time in improving it as it has become a barrier for the language.
• I wish we had a better documentation generator and a better culture of documentation. I really miss the documentation in the Haskell ecosystem (and five years ago, I never thought I would be saying that!). For example, the Haskell community generally expects detailed documentation of data structures, including detailed asymptotics, e.g. Data.Sequence. This complaint extends to many of Clojure’s included features, too. Headline features like STM have incredibly sparse documentation (about one printed page with the semantics only hinted at), so I’m left guessing at what I can actually do with these things.
• The beginner support is exceptionally good. I think I would appreciate more intermediate to advanced support, in the form of books, courseware etc. to carry through to advanced Clojure.
• I love Clojure. The docs are phenomenal. The improvements to the ClojureScript site and getting started and the CLI tools have been huge.
• As a beginner I really struggle to understand the api docs. I tend to use third-party websites more often.
• It would be great to know things like when to use a record vs a map. Intermediate guides would be nice. Also a guide on effective idiomatic Clojure like golang provides.
• Please work on improving the ease of use. The doc strings for the core language are third rate, poorly written, cryptic and unhelpful. The error messages (although presented more nicely in 1.10) are still the same terrible error messages as they have been for years.
• I’d ask for more examples in documentation and provide more tutorials like Scala School or Elixir School for Clojure, for newbies like me.
• Beginner experience still needs more work. Please consult with first-time programmers and teachers who teach them.

Startup time

Startup time has been a perennial complaint, and there haven’t been any major changes here.

• This long-standing issue of startup time + poor runtime performance (out of the box, without tinkering) + insanely high memory usage is becoming the major drawback of the language for me (and us). We are planning to move to a faster language (probably Rust or Go).
• I would like to use Clojure (not CLJS) in AWS Lambdas for a side project but the painfully slow startup time prevents me from doing so. Improving startup times will do more than just improve developer happiness, it will make Clojure a much better tool for serverless computing.

Marketing/adoption/staffing

Clojure continues to grow in business adoption, but hiring developers has been one of the top three things preventing people from using Clojure for the last three years. I’ll add that one way that companies could address the mismatched supply and demand of Clojure developers is being more open to remote workers. Update: Alex Miller also suggested training people in Clojure, which I thought about when preparing the post, but forgot to include in the final copy.

A new option in the survey this year was “Convincing coworkers/companies/clients”; it was ranked number one in preventing people from adopting Clojure. In my opinion, this is a significant issue to be addressed if Clojure wants to grow its market share further. This probably needs more research to find out what the barriers are to convincing people. Elm is proof that exotic languages can be adopted widely, we should learn from what they’ve done.

• We’d all benefit from wider Clojure take up. I worry about the view from the outside looking in. Why is it not attractive to more?
• My biggest problem after one year of intense Clojure learning/coding is to find a Clojure job as remote (because there are zero Clojure jobs in Taiwan). Regardless of how good I am at writing functional code, finding a remote job (outside of the US) is hard.
• Very passionate evangelist 5+ years — It’s surprising how hard it is to have some folks even consider Clojure. Rubyists are particularly baffled: “ok what do you mean REPL driven — we have pry!”, etc.
• I co-founded a startup company and we picked Clojure as our primary language and are very happy with the decision. A nice note is that almost none of our hires knew Clojure before, they all learned it quickly and like it! I don’t see a lack of Clojure talent as a concern at all.
• Clojure is thoughtfully designed and stable. It’s a dynamic, functional lisp that can actually be sold to the bosses (A sentence I never thought I would write).
• Clojure has a great community and great technology but it would be super helpful in selling the language if there were more efforts put into marketing the language and perhaps having “blessed” solutions using Clojure from Cognitect; similar to what Lightbend does with Scala.
• Thank you for all the hard work you all have been and continue to put into Clojure. We’ve built our entire new startup on Clojure, and was able to hire an amazing team within just a year by tapping into the local, tight-knit community.

Language

There were again more suggestions for improvements to existing language features, or development of new ones.

• Please, take a look once again at Dunaj Project or similar ideas. I believe that the community still have many great ideas which could be adopted by Clojure and wouldn’t bring up any breaking changes. And we need better IDE for sure.
• Please spend time improving clojure.test.
• When I dream, I dream of seeing a slime-style backtrace in Clojure.
• ClojureScript namespace definition <-> :require <-> macro & reader conditionals - and how these interact with each other is seriously non-trivial; especially so for macros you intend to use in Clojure too. Simplification there would be welcome, if possible.

Language Development Process

2018 had a lot of discussions about Clojure’s development process, and the relationship between the core team and the community. I was very curious to see how widely those feelings were reflected in the free-form comments from respondents. After compliments (~230), this was the most common comment type, with ~70 responses (positive, negative, and in-between) on Clojure’s language development process (out of 563 total comments). While many people had issues with the development process, there were also many people who were supportive of how Clojure is currently developed.

• Grateful for the careful stewardship of Clojure and ClojureScript by Rich Hickey and Cognitect.
• Clojure has strong opinions on how software should be built. It needs to keep those strong opinions as it’s these opinions that differentiate it and make it attractive. Keep up the great work!
• Clojure is Amazing and you guys do a FANTASTIC job!!! Ignore the critics and keep doing things just like you have been. Thank you for this wonderful language!!
• Closed core development and disappointment with spec have made made many friends leave Clojure/Script last year. Let’s make 2019 better.
• I love Clojure, and an extremely grateful to Rich, Stu, Alex, etc for their continuing stewardship and work of this fantastic gift. With respect to recent kerfuffles about community involvement, I simultaneously understand and respect Rich’s position, and I am also concerned that some very respected Clojure developers who have contributed a lot (IMHO) feel disconnected and may be drifting away from the community.
• About the governance of Clojure by Cognitect: thank you all! You’re doing it right.
• Managing expectations in 2018 is about 10 years too late. Please give a signal that the core team recognises that, and also how much the community is worth to Clojure as a language before dismissing any critics to the (previously very unclear) contribution/lifecycle process.
• I love the principled stand taken by the clojure/core team about silly arguments erupting in the “community”. I really appreciate that the core is so well thought out and there is a valid resistance to adding “stuff” in there.
• I appreciate Alex’s insights into the Clojure development process, and what he’s working on. I also appreciate the all of the core team’s work that makes Clojure such a great language to use!
• Thanks for recent improvements inline with community wishes. Still makes me sad we don’t have a bigger core team utilizing the skills of (some) of the community that could do things like e.g. actively improve core.async.
• Clojure is a wonderful language; however, we are becoming worried about the future prospects of the language because of the way that Cognitect handles community feedback about the direction of the language.
• 2018 was the year that Rich finally explained how he felt about the open source community around Clojure. For many this was disappointing, but I’m glad that he finally explained how he felt, because at least it is now in the open and people can make decisions with full information. Five years ago, Clojure could afford to lose key contributors because the language was growing and new people were coming along. Clojure is now at a very different place and position, and it’s no longer growing at the same rate, or has the same mindshare. I’ve invested many years, and lots of time into the Clojure community. Up until this year, I thought I would have a long career with Clojure, but I am starting to look around at other language communities for ones that are a better fit for my values.
• Even though I agreed with the substance of Rich Hickey’s “Clarity” gist, it is concerning to me that some of the more prolific library maintainers are leaving the community. I’m sure that had it been me, I would have responded even less graciously. Still, there’s an element of community management that goes beyond just being correct.
• After using Clojure professionally for 7 years, I am hedging my bets by involving myself in the Rust community. While Rich’s comments may be lauded by the greater online community, it has had a large impact on my personal consideration on the state of Clojure. … But, as a member of the community, my concern is that the user base of Clojure cannot grow larger without this concept of ownership changing. This conflict, at the end of the day, is a conflict between what my hopes for Clojure were and the interests of Cognitect … But it seems that Clojure has remained what Rich originally intended it to be. … The conflict is simply that, for some reason, I had assumed my interests were in line with Cognitect’s. It has become clearer, year after year and especially this year, that this is not the case. It’s very likely this misunderstanding is a mistake on my part. Looking back, I see no reason that I should have assumed this other than it is generally the trajectory of most languages focus on growth. For this reason, I will likely exit this community as many others have. I don’t have any hard feelings or regret being part of it. I am very appreciative to all of the hard work that has gone into Clojure and regretful that I did not contribute nearly enough during my time writing it.

Community

People seem to mostly enjoy the Clojure community, but others have had negative experiences, often citing an elitist attitude from some community members. Losing the history from Clojurians Slack came up several times. I’m not sure if everyone is aware of the Clojurians Slack Log?

• … the community has been aggressive/hostile from our experience.
• Love the community. Everyone has been really helpful. I wish it was more diverse and wrote more stuff down. A lot seems to get shared face to face which is great, but makes a really high barrier to entry.
• I’m a bit worried about the long-term viability [of Clojure]. I wouldn’t be so worried about the language and ecosystem not being friendly to newcomers, it’s clearly distilling many years of software practitioner’s experience and thus is opinionated.
• The only bad/ugly part of the Clojure ecosystem is the use of (unsearchable)Slack as the main knowledge base.
• I really enjoy this community. Despite the occasional war of words, generally it seems to be filled with helpful, deep thinking people who are fun to interact with. If we were known for one thing only, I’d like it to be that!
• Thanks so much to the Cognitect team and everyone who helps to make the Clojure community better. I understand that people can be very vocal about the things they dislike and not so much when it comes to appreciate the things that work nicely. Being able to use Clojure professionally to build software that solves problems is really exciting and I’m grateful for it.
• I suggest moving off of slack to a more accessible chat system. Losing history is a bad thing. Check out discord or matrix or gitter or mattermark or any other number of tools made for this purpose.
• I’m concerned that there is too much of a disconnect between the core developers and the wider community. … I think it would be great if the core acknowledged some of the work of Clojurists Together. I think the new clj-commons organisation is a great idea and I’d like to see it better promoted and supported.
• The tone in the community has changed. I think this is very sad.
• The community and the prominent people around it are OUTSTANDING. It is really something to behold. This was my first motivation. I am staying for the good language and tools and etc. but the people behind it are definitely the main treasure here.

Libraries

People are still looking for a curated on-ramp into Clojure web development, a ‘Rails for Clojure’. There are a number of frameworks and templates here, but they don’t seem to be hitting the spot. I’m not sure whether that is because of limited mindshare/marketing, limited documentation, or the scope and quality of the frameworks. Having used Clojure for many years, I no longer find it difficult to find and assemble the pieces that I need for projects, but I definitely remember finding this being difficult when I started. Data Science and ML were places that people saw a niche for Clojure. Several people hoped for improvements on core.async, it still has a number of rough edges.

• I would love to see a way to get open source tools, such as Cider, sustainable support. I’m worried about all you open source maintainers getting burned out and not creating these awesome tools. I don’t know what this looks like yet. [Ed. I’ve got just the program for you]
• I know that Clojure promotes a build-it-yourself type of mentality, which is nice, but it would be great if it had standard implementations for things like webapps (auth, security, etc.) that were leading the way for alternatives to follow. It’s ok to be opinionated, if it works properly.
• One huge opportunity that is still being missed is the field of data science — Clojure(+Clojurescript) has the potential to become the best platform for data research ever. In that field, more than others, it is important to be beginner-friendly.
• Clojure needs a Rails-like “killer app framework” that provides novices a training-wheels included opinionated approach to building applications with Clojure. The roll your own / pick your poison approach to Clojure is a barrier to many.
• core.async could use some love with closing long-open bugs and documentation on best-practices and how to build bigger systems with it. Or maybe it just needs to be officially deprecated? As an outside observer, it feels like it’s in limbo by the clojure-core team. Either way, we’re currently using Zach Tellman’s manifold abstractions a lot to great effect.
• I much prefer the library over framework approach taken in the Clojure community, but I do miss the rapid development which RubyOnRails allows, i.e. conventions.
• … I think a curated collection of recommended third party libraries would help a lot of teams.

Other compilation targets

People have been experimenting with the Graal compiler to produce static binaries without needing a JVM. At this point that seems like the strongest option for people wanting to use Clojure without the JVM. Better Android support was also requested.

• Clojure doesn’t seem to have any plan for Android integration, this is pretty sad considering how much computing power is employed there, and how big of a showcase mobile development is :(
• I think that the limitations of their respective host languages are holding Clojure and ClojureScript back.
• Is there a Clojure project that compiles to WebAssembly?
• So many people want a native Clojure. We need a native Clojure without JVM. Is there a plan about this?
• The advent of GraalVM, and the resulting ability to build Clojure executables that startup up quickly has been a game changer. The slow startup time and need to use a JVM has been a real impediment to Clojure’s adoption as a general purpose language. It would be even better if someone would pursue a Clojure native x86_64 compiler which would generate native executables, but that is probably not going to happen. Ensuring that Clojure can run well with GraalVM is probably the most we can hope for, and there is plenty of work to be done there.
• Difficulties in running on Android may end up forcing me to port all the existing desktop applications off of Clojure to pure Java/Kotlin solutions.
• Targeting two of the most popular VMs is great, but being able to get native performance is always a wish, like LLVM.

Typing

For the past few years people have been less and less worried about types. I suspect this is mostly due to spec.

• Love Clojure. But at two Java shops over four years, the lack of static typing (the ability to command-click identifiers in IntelliJ and navigate to their source, the ability to refactor) has prevented me from winning over colleagues. TBH it’s also reduced my own enthusiasm since the prospect of me working on our 1.6MM LoC project without static typing honestly scares me.
• I’ve selected “no static typing” but matching Haskell is not my intent. Lack of static guarantees is what bothers me. If it were possible to reject programs that are guaranteed to fail, that would be an improvement. For example: (clojure.string/replace nil #"a" "b") or (clojure.string/replace "abc" #"a").

ClojureScript

Shadow CLJS was mentioned by many people as having been a great part of their workflow. For those not using Shadow, externs remain challenging.

• shadow-cljs made me continue developing ClojureScript + started using it in backend services. It provides significantly better support for NPM libs than lein-cljsbuild that I’ve been using before.
• Without shadow-cljs we wouldn’t have been able to use clojurescript because we found it impossible to get the npm packages we needed to work.
• It’s not at a terrible state right now, but I’m at least slightly worried about more divergence between Clojure and ClojureScript in the future.
• shadow-cljs does great job on compiling clojurescript and npm integration, but it more and more diverges from the standard compiler. I would love to see shadow-cljs merged into the mainstream clojurescript compiler. In general: I would like to have better, easier way to compile clojurescript without setting tons of flags.
• Feel like cljs could make an amazing, even-better version of dash (maybe powered by Reagent/re-frame).
• Although work has been done on externs, I find venturing into JavaScript interop fraught with peril. I would be very happy if interop would just work, same as Java interop. Most frustrating is that development builds work but releases don’t. Catching these problems early would seriously mitigate the issue. For now I’m using cljs-oops library, which works very well, but it feels kind of a hack. Overall I’m very content with ClojureScript though!

Setup/tooling

Clojure’s tooling has continued to improve. This year lots of work has been done adding plugins or expanding functionality of the new official Clojure tools. clj on Windows was asked for by many people. Maintainer burnout seems like a significant risk to the Clojure tooling ecosystem.

• I’m happy to see that many have realised we need to find ways to better support the development of CIDER, a crucial part of Clojure development infrastructure. Seems like the lead dev has been burning out recently, and many of us depend on his (and a few others’) goodwill.
• It has been a challenging first year in obtaining high productivity with the tools. Would be great to see a simple but capable tool set get some focus, e.g. Atom or VSCode.
• I no longer want to work with CIDER or Cursive, rather, I’d like to work with REBL + a REPL as my IDE. I believe we can have a renaissance of Clojure tooling if prepl becomes demystified and/or we add a tap-repl, something like tap> to the Clojure repl. This would allow tooling to be added and removed dynamically.
• Please port clj to Windows!
• clj for windows please.
• We need clj under Windows. Is it possible to release it?

Compliments

As always, the vast number of comments were compliments to Clojure and the core team.

• Keep up the good work! 👍
• Clojure is beautiful, functional and concise. It really rejuvenated my love for programming.
• I absolutely love Clojure 💚
• I really appreciate the well thought out design of Clojure. We feel that Clojure gives us distinct advantages while providing a language with minimum disruption.
• 5 years later and I still enjoy writing Clojure. Thanks to all those who make it extremely productive and fun to use!
• I really appreciate all the work Cognitect and the community abroad put into making Clojure and the Clojure community a joy to work with. Keep up the good work!
• It’s my 11th year with Clojure. What a journey. Thanks, Rich and everybody.

Conclusion

Clojure is a great language, and people are very enthusiastic about it. Its adoption in business continues to grow. There are a number of areas for improvement still, especially if the Clojure community wants to grow further. Not all of this work needs to go through Core though, particularly in areas of documentation and guides, libraries, and tooling.

I worry about the Clojure community losing key contributors. There are a few linchpins holding a lot of things together; if we lose them, it will be hard to come back from. If you don’t want to see this happen then please support the libraries and tools you rely on by contributing code, documentation, issue triage, or money.

Almost two years ago, there was a Github issue on reagent (a ClojureScript React wrapper), suggesting that Preact be added as a substitute for React. I wrote up a fairly long comment about why I didn’t think this was a great idea (at least not immediately). React’s recent announcement of the new hooks feature made me think about it again. I’ve republished it here with a few edits for context and time.

Introduction

In principle, I’m not opposed to the idea of Reagent using Preact. It has some cool features and I like that it is small (although in comparison to the total compiled size of a normal CLJS app it’s probably a wash). If Preact worked 100% out of the box with Reagent with no code changes required then I would have no issues with someone swapping out the React dependency for a Preact one and calling it a day. If there are only a few minor tweaks to Reagent required to pass the tests, then again I don’t really have any issues with that. I suspect that even if you have 100% of the tests passing, there will still be issues, as Reagent was built around React, and may not have tests that would cover the difference in behaviour between React and Preact.

Abstraction

It looks like it may not be a pure lift and shift to support Preact. If that’s the case then we run into a bigger issue: abstraction. Reagent was written and built around the ideas and in the context of React. There are assumptions (probably tens or hundreds) built around React’s API and possibly implementation details too.

Adding abstraction adds a large cost because you can no longer program against a concrete API and implementation, you now have to consider two. There are three numbers in computer science, 0, 1, and many. We would be moving from 1 to many, and that takes work.

An aside: recently at work, we were looking at moving a legacy system from only supporting dates in the past to also be able to support dates in the future. This should be straightforward right? We talked to the programmers responsible for it and they couldn’t guarantee that it would work, nor whether supporting future dates would be easy or hard. In the building of that (or any) system, hundreds of simplifying assumptions are made around the context that the system is going to be built in.

It is a very common pattern to have different backends and I don’t see any downsides to it.

I can’t think of a single example of a system with multiple backends that didn’t have any downsides to it, e.g. ORMs, HTML/CSS/JS, Java. There may be some, but they would be the exceptions that prove the rule. Everything has a cost, the question is whether there is a benefit that outweighs the cost. It is much harder to remove something from software than to add it, which is why we should be certain that the benefits outweigh the costs.

While Preact strives to be API-compatible with React, portions of the interface are intentionally not included. The most noteworthy of these is createClass() … https://preactjs.com/guide/switching-to-preact#3-update-any-legacy-code

Reagent currently uses createClass. There are workaround options provided, but this is an example of some of the API differences between React and Preact which you need extra compatibility layers to support. Do we know if the compatibility layer works 100% correctly?

A possible future if Preact support is merged now

As a thought experiment, let’s assume that Preact is in Reagent with some kind of compatibility shim. Preact already has several performance optimisations that people can take advantage of:

customizable update batching, optional async rendering, DOM recycling and optimized event handling via Linked State. - (from Preact homepage)

Wouldn’t you want to be able to take advantage of those in your application? I certainly would. Now to do so, you may run into issues because the compatibility shim layer that was written was encoded around default assumptions of React, and they may not apply to Preact. Do we have to rework the shim layer, or lower level Reagent API stuff? Who is going to do that work? Who is going to review it and merge it?

Let’s consider the reverse. Perhaps in some new React version, Facebook comes out with a new API which is faster or better suited to Reagent’s style of rendering, so we want to switch to that [since writing this they came out with Hooks. These may be added to Preact also, but this isn’t certain and neither is the time-frame]. However that new model may not work with Preact. Again, we’re in a bit of a pickle: Preact users want to be carried along with Reagent and get the benefits of new Reagent work, but it may not be easy or possible to support the new API for them. Now what?

Consider everyday development on Reagent. Reagent’s source code is built around a very detailed understanding of React and is highly optimised. If Preact was supported too, then developers would probably need to gain an understanding of Preact too.

At the moment, Preact has one main contributor, it has been around for 1.5 years. React has many contributors. I’d estimate there are 100+ people with very deep knowledge of React. It’s been around (in public form) for 3.5 years. In general, the JavaScript community does not have a reputation for long-term support of projects. What happens if development slows/stops on Preact and the compatibility layer isn’t kept up to date? It is much harder to remove something than it is to add it. Who decides when/if to remove Preact from Reagent at a future date?

These are all hypotheticals, but I hope this demonstrates that the extra abstraction provided by supporting two VDOM layers doesn’t come for free. At the very least, it consumes extra brain cycles when testing and developing Reagent, extra support and documentation costs from users wanting to use one or the other, as well as extra indirection when running and debugging apps using Reagent.

The Innovators Dilemma

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading “The Innovators Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen. One of the key points he makes in that book is the difference between integrated and modular products and when to develop each kind.

CHRISTENSEN: When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn’t yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.

In the early years of the mainframe computer, for example, you could not have existed as an independent contract manufacturer of mainframe computers, because the way they were made depended upon the art that was employed in the design. The way you designed them depended upon the art that you would employ in manufacturing. There were no rules of design for manufacturing.

Similarly, you could not have existed as an independent maker of logic circuitry or operating systems or core memory because the design of those subsystems was interdependent. The reason for the interdependence was that the product wasn’t good enough. In every product generation, the engineers were compelled by competition to fit the pieces of the system together in a more efficient way to wring the maximum performance possible out of the technology that was available at the time. This meant that you had to do everything in order to do anything. When the way you compete is to make better products, there is a big competitive advantage to being integrated. … In order to compete in that way, to be fast and flexible and responsive, the architecture of the product has to evolve toward modularity. Then, because the functionality is more than good enough, you can afford to have standard interfaces; you can trade off performance to get the advantages of speed and flexibility. These standard interfaces then enable independent providers of pieces of the system to thrive, and the industry comes to be dominated by a population of specialized firms rather than integrated companies.

• Clayton M. Christensen, The Thought Leader Interview

I would argue that we are still very much at the point where the current VDOM libraries aren’t good enough yet. They aren’t yet ready to be commoditised, and the best option is to tightly integrate.

Options from here (with some conjecture)

1. Someone can make a PR to Reagent to add support for Preact. It will probably take a while to get merged because it is a significant change. Once it is merged and released, there will probably need to be several rounds of revisions before it is ready to go. Because Reagent moves relatively slowly, this will take a while.

   Reagent also has a large number of production users, so new releases need to be well tested and stable. Adding Preact to the mix is going to slow this down further.

2. Someone can make a fork of Reagent (let’s say it’s called Preagent). You can run wild experimenting with what is the best way to use Preact in Preagent, take advantage of all of the great features Preact has, and have a much faster turnaround time for releasing and using it. You will be able to work out what is the right API and integration points for Preact because you have room to experiment with it, without the weight and responsibility of bringing the rest of the Reagent users along with you.

   At some point in the future, you could review merging Preagent back into Reagent, given all that you now know. You would also have the weight of evidence on your side where you can demonstrate the benefits of Preact and can show how many users want Preact. This would let you make a much better case for including Preact, give you what you want in the meantime, and likely provide a higher quality integration in the future.

   Alternatively, you may decide that Preagent is better served going its own way and integrating more closely with Preact. This is also a good option.

Abstraction is not free

The point I have been trying to drive through this post is that abstraction is not free. Over-abstraction is a common anti-pattern and it saps productivity. I had a friend who recently left a Clojure job and started a Java one. He quipped to me about how he’d forgotten what it was like to trace code through five layers of abstraction to get to the concrete implementation. As programmers, we’re trained to solve problems by adding layers of abstraction, but that isn’t always the best way to solve the problem.

Lastly, this isn’t a personal attack on you or your ideas. I’m all for innovation in ClojureScript webapps and I think that it is worth investigating Preact and how it could work in the ClojureScript ecosystem 😄. I’m not against Preact. I would consider using it if there was a measurable benefit. I’m just suggesting that the best way to go about this is probably not to integrate it into Reagent as the first step.

I sent the first newsletter for The REPL two years ago, and I have really enjoyed writing it. I’ve learnt a lot from what people have written and created to share with the Clojure community. Sometimes when I’m writing the newsletter I’ve thought “That’s fascinating, I’d love to hear more about the technical details of that”. Now I have an outlet for doing just that.

I first had the idea of producing a Clojure podcast around January 2018. I didn’t have the time for it then, but the idea kept swirling around the back of my brain. When Michael Drogalis’s Pyrostore was acquired, I wanted to hear more about the acquisition, so I contacted Michael to see if he wanted to talk about it. That became the first episode.

My goal for The REPL is to talk with people about the technical details of the projects they are working on. The Clojure community has a ton of interesting people doing really creative work with Clojure. I’ve really enjoyed talking with a bunch of people already, and I’m looking forward to talking to more of them in the future. You can find it therepl.net. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, RSS and all of the other common podcasting apps.

Cognitect has recently released the results of their State of Clojure Survey for 2018. For the last two Clojure survey’s, I have reviewed the free-form answers at the end of the survey and tried to summarise the zeitgeist of community feeling. I enjoy it each time, and so here’s this years analysis.

Some comments have been lightly edited for spelling, clarity, and brevity.

Error messages

Error messages have been one of the top complaints about Clojure since the surveys started, and this year they have gotten worse with the introduction of specs on core macros. I’m not the only one who has noticed this either. In 2015 Colin Fleming gave a talk on improving Clojure’s error messages with Grammars. In previous surveys there was hope that spec would be able to use this approach to improve error messages; Ben Brinckerhoff has recently shown a proof-of-concept that gives some similar (excellent) error messages in Expound.

• My primary wish would be for more helpful error messages (e.g a la Elm) in Clojure and Clojurescript.
• I was excited about spec initially; however, I find the error messages so large, noisy and unhelpful that I don’t want to use it. To put it another way: when there’s a spec failure, my heart sinks; knowing that the next few minutes are probably going to be frustrating and painful.
• Spec was supposed to help with error messages, but it just made them worse. Stuff like (let [f/x 42] f/x) now emit insane error messages. But it looks like the Clojure dev team has moved on to improving command line tools now? Can we please just get error messages fixed before a ton of people get frustrated and jump ship? The current state of errors in Clojure is an embarrassment to the community.
• Error messages is a big show stopper. I am trying to get Clojurescript adopted for web and react-native development withing our organization for few years, but I always see the same pattern: people get some error during project setup/configuration and get stuck forever because they have no idea what the error means at all and how get it fixed. Please please improve error reporting. :)
• A big problem for new starters, an issue that has been singled out time and time again over the years, is poor error messages that lead to difficult debugging of code structure. That Clojure 1.9 has actually made these error messages harder to understand is a disaster. […] I hope I’m wrong and that I’ll understand the grand plan eventually.
• Please please please please enhance the error messages. An incredible error reporting would make this language out of this world, and that would make the biggest difference.

Spec

Comments ranged from loving spec to disliking it. There were also requests for more guidance on how to apply spec to real-world use-cases and how to integrate it into whole programs.

• OMG Spec is amazing. It’s dramatically changing the way I program. I’ve been starting new projects out by writing specs before nearly any other code. The result is that I am able to extend my hammock time to the keyboard, and think through my domain model with composable, high level descriptions implemented as specs. The fact that these high level descriptions then become so useful in so many different ways — generative testing, value conformation for data api parsing, more useful error messages, etc — is a stunning thing to behold. I’m excited to see how the fruits of these ideas permeate through our and other communities.
• The presence of “spec” on some of those lists made me want to rate everything else “important” so I could show how unimportant it is. […]
• spec is awesome, but its dogmatism leaves us needing tools like spec-tools, which makes working with spec clunky.
• There needs to be more guidance, development and reliance on spec from both Cognitect and community.

Docs

Documentation in all forms has been another perrenial complaint but this is starting to improve. clojure.org continues to add more guides this year on Programming at the REPL and Higher Order Functions among other things. Martin Klepsch’s cljdoc holds a lot of promise to improve the state of third-party documentation, by automatically generating and publishing docs for published JARs.

• We should take example of how Rust community/documenation is run: BIG focus on newcomers, features MUST be perfectly documented before being shipped. This serve advanced users as well. No offense, but Rich Hickey should understand what good documentation is, or delegate completely to people who do so that he can focus and making a even greater language (his strong point).
• I feel the true weak points are confusing error messages, not enough friendly guides/tutorials for the early to beginner Clojurist, and a lack of solid CLJ/S example projects. These are key because it is difficult to know the right way without “blessed” examples.
• Please provide a good set of tutorials on Javascript Interop such as how to translate a ES6 or higher JS file into ClojureScript.
• The documentation is really awful - incomplete, vague, no examples, no semantic precision - not up to the standards of what one normally sees for programming language documentation.
• Please improve the docstrings. They are the worst of any programming language I have ever used.
• Really, the core documentation is not written for beginners or even intermediates
• What I miss most is a book which teaches how to approach problems with Clojure. I mean primarily not “best practices” or “design patterns” or language independent algorithms. Nor a kind of language reference or few lines long mini examples, but complex, advanced examples with detailed explanations about the pros and cons of certain solutions applied/not applied.

Startup time

Startup time continues to be an issue for people. As serverless computing becomes more mainstream, this may end up pushing people from Clojure to ClojureScript, or elsewhere.

• Startup time is really really really really really long
• Startup time never used to be an issue for me, as my services were long running and persistent. Lately however, I’ve been using Docker for jobs. Startup time becomes an issue here. Continued improvements in total app startup time will pay dividends going forward.
• Startup time regression. Clojure 1.9 startup time is 1/3 longer then Clojure 1.8 (1.6s vs 1.1s on my humble machine).

Marketing/adoption/staffing

There were lots of comments this year in this category. Even after 10 years, Clojure still unknown or seen as being extremely niche to many people, especially among business stakeholders. Hiring seems to be less of an issue than in years past. There is still a large contingent of programmers looking to work with Clojure in remote positions, although it’s hard to say whether this proportion is any higher than in other language communities.

• I recently hired a programmer with no Clojure experience. She was writing lovely idiomatic Clojure within a month. The biggest difficulty was overcoming her initial fear of parentheses.
• To use Clojure(Script) more it would help if there was marketing for it. It’s still largely unknown, and therefore hard to sell to other companies.
• There is always an uphill battle in pushing Clojure as an enterprise solution, this seems to mostly occur to lack of marketing. Non-technical decision makers care about branding.
• I’ve found that some folks really dislike lisps passionately. One of our vendors indicated that his customers and employees were highly critical of the use of Clojure as an extension point.
• Unfortunately, this year my organization in ceasing its use of Clojure for production projects after many years of using it. Staffing and on-boarding external resources are the 2 main reasons for doing so.
• Hard to convince managers at work to use Clojure because of the perception that its a fringe language
• I wish it was easier to find a remote (non US-only) remote Clojure/Clojurescript job for people with no major Clojure experience :)
• It’s very important to address the enterprise software community. We need formal tools, formal approaches, standard IDEs, SonarQube, Eclipse, Jenkins, e.t.c.
• I believe “JavaScript converts” will be an important source of growth for Clojure moving forward.
• We find Clojure a joy to use and hiring Clojure engineers or those excited and capable of learning Clojure has been a big advantage, contrary to common wisdom. Clojure positions tend to self select for strong candidates.

Language

• Enterprise Java tends to lean heavily on reflection to pull components together (e.g., Spring, annotation-driven JUnit and JAX-RS). To incorporate Clojure into those environments, lots of component-specific wrappers are needed. It is easy to slip a little Java into a Clojure codebase, but this has made the reverse difficult.
• I would love to see some more work on improving clojure.test. It works, but I wish there was less stateful macro magic and more flexibility with fixturing and test structure
• I’m increasingly finding that I’m writing more cljc than clj or cljs but find it really frustrating that cljs seems to be a second citizen to clj. It would be much better if there was actually a core Clojure library/api that was actively supported by both, with clear variances between them.
• I would love to see some work towards using JVM MethodHandle’s to obviate the need for the compiler’s direct linking. Seems we could have our var cake, and eat it too.
• We have a relatively large codebase and 20+ build targets (fat jars/advance compilation js files). we’d like better AOT support and ability to incrementally compile this code base as most changes only affect a few targets. right now AOT compile is pretty black box and not very amenable to building tooling.

Language Development Process

This hasn’t changed in a long time, and I don’t see it changing in the future, but it has been persistently highlighted by many people as a big issue.

• For long term success of Clojure/ClojureScript, it’s important for the Clojure core team & project to be more open and welcoming like other open source projects. The view from outside of the Cognitect bubble is that the language and community aren’t healthy at all, and I fear for it’s long run viability.
• The core team seems to be extra cautious and move really slowly on the language and core libraries. And the roadmap for releasing new versions is really opaque to the community.
• Cognitect has continued to be good technical stewards of Clojure, but poor stewards of the relationship between the core team and the rest of the community. Many (most?) senior Clojure programmers want nothing to do with contributing to Clojure or any projects owned by Core (like the site) because the process is designed to frustrate and prevent meaningful contributions.
• Cognitect need to climb a few rungs down the ivory tower and engage with the community as if it were in fact made up of human beings trying to do their jobs.
• I don’t know what direction the core team is taking Clojure, and the top issues (startup time, poor error messages, lack of involvement with the community and numerous improvements to Java interop in JIRA being ignored) have not changed significantly over the past 5 years. I never felt welcomed to contribute, and seeing how Skummet and other large efforts from the community were largely ignored was not encouraging.
• More attention to JIRA issues/patches/contributions would be great. […] I painstakingly write a patch and jump through the JIRA hoops; but there it languishes. The dev team’s complete silence is not encouraging. Makes me feel more of an outsider, less of a part of the community.

Community

By and large, people found the community welcoming, and personally I have found it to be one of the best things about working with Clojure. However there is a persistent undercurrent of eliteness from some Clojure programmers which really puts people off the language.

• I find Clojure a great language, but I haven’t noticed any increase in market (or mind) share. Quite the opposite, it seems to be going nowhere, possibly dying a slow death I hope I’m wrong, but, for now anyway, I’ve given up on it.
• Thanks, Alex et al! I’m still extremely happy with Clojure, and appreciate the community. I worry a bit about the possibility of clj/s losing user share and dwindling, which I didn’t worry about a year ago. I hope like hell that that won’t happen, and try to do at least a bit toward preventing it.
• That defn podcast is bloody marvelous
• Being in the Clojure community since around 1.2, I loved the language then, and I like the direction, it’s been taking since. The community is great, very friendly and even its most controversial figures are usually polite, intelligent people. Heck, even the local troll from the mailing list is occasionally helpful, stays on point in his threads and sticks with the conversation, even after blowing stuff up.
• clojure.org changes so infrequently (like once a year, if that?) that I’m concerned the language is not being enthusiastically supported and will soon fade away. It makes me nervous to invest time and money in a language that seems to have no vitality.
• Clojure conferences lack diversity in both attendees, speakers, and programs. I hope the merging of Conj and West will improve that this year.
• People who give to the Clojure community are role models. I’m serious about this. I’ve woken up and thought “what would Bruce Hauman do” more than once. I talk with my daughters about the Clojure community.
• Cognitect is doing an awesome job, making programming fun again! Alex Miller is very helpful.
• Effort community makes to promote diversity, particularly in terms of women is good, although there is a long way to go.
• I am doing Clojure for some time now and what does not bring me joy is the fact that the message to other communities (other languages) is clear: “we are better and smarter”. […] I think we can do better without thinking that we are.
• I didn’t want to tick the unpleasant communities cause it is not […] lately [however], […] I started noticing a kind of “elitism” especially from people that are frequent speakers or started working early with the language.
• I have multiple colleagues, all great developers, all former Clojure developers. Whenever Clojure comes up they never fail to mention how alienating the “smarter than you” attitude sometimes present in the community can be.
• I’m worried about the perceived shrinking of the Clojure community
• I’ve gotten to know a few more female developers using Clojure in the past year, and have learned that some parts of the community are scaring/driving women away. This includes unpleasant interactions on Slack and working to avoid certain people at Conj.
• Not to put too much stock in the oversimplified Gartner hype curve model, it does seem like Clojure is passing through what they call the trough of disillusionment.
• Please consider supporting Clojurists Together, even launching initiatives for the community to help through it.

Libraries

More guidance on how to compose and select libraries remains a common common issue for people in this section, as well as improving the state of library documentation.

• The plethora of web app (both client & server side) frameworks is both bad and good. Too many to choose from (no standard like rails) and also lots of options. Also, limited security options, especially w.r.t. use of session state, async handlers & server-less designs.
• I frequently find myself frustrated by looking for a library that will help me do “X”. There are many choices out there, each of which does some subset of what one might want in that arena, but a different subset.
• It is sad that I often find interesting Clojure or ClojureScript libraries that are abandoned and haven’t been updated for a long time
• Need more quality open source projects for machine learning and data visualization libraries. Great to see the advances from conj but for a language that has a front end tool built in, there is no excuse for someone not to build a great visualization library for data science.
• No de-facto web framework, Pedestal is in dire need of documentation, Schema is deprecated and Spec isn’t ready, New CLI tools in Clojure 9 competing with Leiningen/Boot. All of these complaints have something in common: it looks like the Clojure core team is actively hostile towards the larger community. All community-built tools/libraries are open to attack and replacement by the core team and there’s always fear of a major destabilizing revolution everyday.
• Several widely used library started to stall… sustainability might become a concern… [Ed: hopefully Clojurists Together can help here]

Other targets

As in previous years, there are a smattering of people asking for alternative platforms to target other than JS and the JVM. LLVM, Go, and Web Assembly all had interest from people.

• Is it posible to use Clojure with the Go ecosystem? That would be amazing
• It is hard to watch Go get so much mind-share. Clojure on the JVM is great, but it would sure be nice if I could build a Clojure application that didn’t need the JVM.
• I still long for a low-level oriented Clojure dialect to be able to produce small clj executables with low overhead and systems programming capacity, but one can dream!
• webassembly support? and native support? (like a scala-native)

Typing

Requests for static typing were down from previous years. I attribute that mostly to spec gaining wider adoption and understanding.

• Clojure needs to make a better case for why static typing is not necessary for maintainable, large, multi-contributor codebases and how the REPL dev process helps with that.
• I still love Clojure as a whole more than any other. I’d love to address long-term maintenance. The difficulty of stepping back into a codebase after some time can be more challenging than with Haskell or PureScript. I wish the compiler could do more for me. Spec is huge though, really enjoying it. It still takes a good amount of discipline to use well, but I’m thankful for it.
• I used Clojure for one work project because a coworker recommended it. Overall it was a good experience, but the lack of a type system made maintaining that particular project too difficult. Tools like Plumatic Schema and Typed Clojure helped in some ways but didn’t end up pulling their weight. Regardless, the Clojure service continues to run today and it’s better than the Ruby service it replaced.

ClojureScript

ClojureScript continues to improve, although getting the tooling setup remains a pain point, as does integrating NPM modules. There are recent improvements on that front though, so this may not be such an issue in 12 months time. I have heard lots of good things about shadow-cljs, it seems to be a strong tool to investigate for ClojureScript usage, especially if you work with a lot of NPM modules.

• ClojureScript has had a serious push this year… ;)
• For CLJS, we really need to get npm deps working. Right now it’s hard to get right, or at least there’s no up-to-date tutorials available..?
• I find I spend more time than I should configuring my development environment so it works well. This is particularly bad in React Native, but cljs/figwheel can still be frustratingly complex to get right.
• Lack of async/await support in CLJS is holding it back. The JS community has settled on promises and async/await as the primary asynchronous patterns, and although core.async is useful for certain things, shoehorning existing JS code into it is very kludgy.
• Nothing has made a bigger improvement to my ClojureScript workflow in the past couple of years than shadow-cljs.
  • Intelligent externs inference, plus simple ^js or ^clj tagging for anything that’s missed
  • Virtually trouble free usage of other JavaScript modules /npm
  • Way faster cljs compile flow due to smart caching of intermediate artifacts
  • Self-hosted dependencies handled very well
• NPM support in ClojureScript seems to be a little bit tricky and not working all the time for all the libs. But has been improved a lot in the past.
• Probably my biggest frustration has been trying to use libraries from JS in a full-on ClojureScript front-end app.

Setup/tooling

Tooling on the Clojure side seems to be somewhat less of an issue this year, but setting up ClojureScript projects with all the things that you need remains an issue for many people.

• Clojure is now mature and stable enough to start focusing in tooling. Many JVM tools are not Clojure specific and for people coming to Clojure from non-jvm languages diagnosing problems is a barrier (more with systems in production). From GC issues, to debugging exceptions, to attaching to a process in runtime to peek at some memory or patch something. It was pretty easy to do with gdb in linux, it should be much more easily done with Clojure.
• Fast track to CLJS web dev for junior devs, in one piece in one place. There is not that much essential knowledge/tooling needed to get started that it can’t fit in a CreateReactApp-like solution. Too much content, too many sources, don’t help. No need to be exhaustive.
• Git-based deps seem like a bad idea. clj build tool is otherwise cool, if a bit unnecessary given the prevalence and quality of leiningen, along with the stability afforded through maven central/clojars.
• I think we should pay more attention to interactive programming. Like what Bret Victor proposes, beyond the REPL.
• Making changes to libraries then having to jar them just to test is hard (checkouts never worked for me (or others) with cljs). I hope Alex Miller’s recent work will fix that.
• Once Figwheel and Reagent and tests were set up, my experience as a developer was very positive - barring some bad times with advanced Closure optimization bugs. Really happy with ClojureScript myself, but it would be hard to convince a friend to start using it, because there is no clear or standard way to develop.

Compliments

As always, the survey was dominated by positive comments. Here were some of my favourites.

• Clojure has ruined every other language for me. Every time I have to do something in another language, I always wish it was in clojure. It’s just so easy to get things done in clojure. I love the language and hope to use it forever.
• Clojure’s still the language I find myself turning to most frequently when given a choice. It just feels natural, the toolkit simple and yet powerful enough to express pretty much anything at a whim.
• I’ve been using Clojure professionally for at least 4 years and these have been the most productive years of my career. I’m looking forward to using spec more fully. I’m looking forward to seeing what improvements come to the language in the next few years and have no desire to leave. Thanks so much for this language, community, and way of working.
• This. Is. The. Best. Language. Ever. High-level programming done right. Thank you Rich.

Conclusion

When I went to write this years summary, I re-read the previous posts to remind myself of where we were a few years ago. While some areas have improved, I was struck by how many of the comments could have been lifted from previous years survey results. There was a worrying trend in the community and adoption sections that people perceive Clojure to be shrinking. Perception doesn’t always match reality, and it may be (as a commenter noted) that Clojure is entering the trough of disillusionment phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle. However I think there are a lot of low-hanging fruit around that could significantly improve the experience and ecosystem around Clojure without changes to the core language.

When I develop ClojureScript projects, I almost always use Figwheel. It’s a great tool, but sometimes my app ended up using stale files. This led to some very confusing debugging sessions. It only happened some of the time, and was always fixed after a hard refresh. I thought about just disabling the browser cache, but I didn’t like ignoring the issue. After seeing colleagues struggle with stale caching too, I decided to figure out what was going on, and fix it once and for all.

Cache-Control rules everything around me

The first thing to do was to add a Cache-Control: no-cache header to all static file responses. Despite the name, no-cache tells the browser it can cache files, but must always validate them with the server before using them. If the browser’s cached version is up-to-date, a compliant HTTP server should return a 304 Not Modified response, otherwise it serves the new file.

If you don’t provide a caching header to an HTTP response, the browser can choose its own caching behaviour. The browser’s caching heuristics are much more aggressive than you want in development, and lead to the weird caching behaviour I was seeing.

I thought this had fixed the issue, but occasionally I would still notice stale files were being used. After looking closely at the compiled output files, I made a surprising discovery.

ClojureScript copies file modification times

ClojureScript (as of March 2018) copies the last-modified date of ClojureScript source files to the compiled JavaScript target files. This is so that the compiler can detect changes to source files. JavaScript from the Closure compiler (e.g. goog.base), gets a modification time that matches the time it was compiled.

Neither of these dates are particularly useful to use as a Last-Modified date header for caching purposes.

• Closure compiled JavaScript doesn’t change from run to run, so caching based on last modified date will not achieve as high a hit-rate as possible.
• A ClojureScript file that uses macros from other Clojure files will get the modification date of the consuming ClojureScript file, even if the macro files have changed more recently and caused a recompilation. This was leading to the second round of caching issues that I saw.

To avoid these issues, I recommend removing the Last-Modified header from the response when in development.

ETags

To knock both problems on the head once and for all (hopefully), I added a CRC32 checksum based ETag for static file responses. I packaged this up in a library ring-etag-middleware so that other projects could also use it.

Serve 304 Not Modified responses

At this point the browser will check with the server for every ClojureScript file, on every pageload. However, this causes all of the files to be downloaded each time, even if they haven’t changed. The last step is to add ring’s ring.middleware.not-modified/wrap-not-modified middleware. This returns a “304 Not Modified” response if the ETag provided in the If-None-Match request header matches the ETag header in the response.

Summary

As best as I can tell, this has completely solved all of the odd caching issues that I was seeing, while still keeping the app snappy to load by reusing as much of the cache as possible. If you are serving ClojureScript files in development and not using Figwheel, I recommend you follow these three steps:

1. Set a Cache-Control: no-cache header
2. Add an ETag to your static file responses
3. Remove the Last-Modified header
4. Wrap your responses in ring.middleware.not-modified/wrap-not-modified or the equivalent in your Clojure web framework.

I was excited this morning when I checked Hacker News and saw an article from Cockroach Labs titled “Your Database Should Work Like a CDN”. I’m a big fan of Cockroach DB and enjoy their blog posts. I clicked on this one, but came away disapointed. I don’t think it fairly contrasted Cockroach with it’s competitors, and instead made some incomplete arguments instead of selling Cockroach on it’s merits.

In this article I will analyse sections of the post and add more context where I think some was left out.

Analysis

Availability

To maximize the value of their services, companies and their CTOs chase down the elusive Five Nines of uptime

Only companies with sophisticated operations teams can seriously set an SLA for five nines. It’s doable, but comes with a heavy lift if your service is doing anything non-trivial. It’s certainly not the default position among the industry as far as I can tell. The Google SRE book has a good section on this.

For many companies the cost of moving from a single region deployment to a multi-region one is too great and doesn’t provide enough benefits. Some services don’t actually need to be available to five nines, and if not done well, moving to multi-region deployments may make your system less fault-tolerant, not more.

This is particularly crucial for your customer’s data. If your data’s only located in a single region and it goes down, you are faced with a “non-zero RPO”, meaning you will simply lose all transactions committed after your last backup.

If a whole region dropped into a sinkhole in the earth then you would lose all transactions after your last backup. However that’s not a failure scenario that we tend to worry about (although maybe we should?). Every time a major cloud provider has had a zone/region go down, data was partially/wholly unavailable during the outage, but no committed data was lost once service was restored (that I know of?).

…and Bureaucracy?

This impending legislation requires that businesses receive explicit consent from EU users before storing or even processing their data outside the EU. If the user declines? Their data must always (and only) reside within the EU. If you’re caught not complying to GDPR? You’ll face fines of either 4% of annual global turnover or €20 Million, whichever is greater.

I’m not a GPDR expert, but this seems like an incomplete summary of the GPDR rules around processing, especially as the processing rule applies only to the processing of an EU user’s personal data (AFAICT), and conflates requiring consent for storing/processing personal data with storing the data outside of the EU. From article 6:

Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:

a) the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;

b) processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract;

c-f) [Public/government interest exceptions)

If you have entered into a contract with the data subject, and that data is necessary for the contract, then I think you are fine (IANAL). As far as I can tell, transfers to Third Countries are OK as long as there are appropriate safeguards.

This is the part of my critique that I am least confident about, I’d welcome some links confirming/rebutting this.

When you take GDPR in the context of the existing Chinese and Russian data privacy laws––which require you to keep their citizen’s data housed within their countries […]

If you follow the links in the article, you see this for China:

Does the Cybersecurity Law require my company to keep certain data in China?

[…] To that end, the Cybersecurity Law requires “critical information infrastructure” providers to store “personal information” and “important data” within China unless their business requires them to store data overseas and they have passed a security assessment. At this point, it remains unclear what qualifies as “important data,” although its inclusion in the text of the law alongside “personal data” means that it likely refers to non-personal data. […]

“Critical Information Infrastructure” providers are defined a bit more narrowly, but the law still casts a fairly wide net. […] the law names information services, transportation, water resources, and public services, among other service providers, as examples.

and this for Russia:

3.6 Generally, to transfer personal data outside the Russian Federation, the operator will have to make sure, prior to such transfer, that the rights of personal data subjects will enjoy adequate and sufficient protection in the country of destination.

Some companies will need to store data on China/Russian servers, but the laws here are far narrower than “If you have any data from a Chinese or Russian person or company, you must store it in their country”.

Managed & Cloud Databases

Managed and Cloud databases often tout their survivability because they run in “multiple zones.” This often leads users to believe that a cloud database that runs in multiple availability zones can also be distributed across the globe.

It might be an assumption you would make if you have no experience with databases, but it’s not one that I’ve ever seen a software engineer make.

There are caveats to this, of course. For example, with Amazon RDS, you can create read-only replicas that cross regions, but this risks introducing anomalies because of asynchronous replication: and anomalies can equal millions of dollars in lost revenue or fines if you’re audited.

I’m not sure how asynchronous replication lag could result in failing an audit and incurring millions of dollars of fines. I spent a few minutes trying to come up with a scenario and couldn’t. Losing revenue from users also seems speculative, I’m not really clear how this would happen.

Designing a system to run across multiple regions with asynchronous replication is certainly not trivial, but people do it every day. If they were losing millions of dollars from it, they would probably stop.

In addition, this forces all writes to travel to the primary copy of your data. This means, for example, you have to choose between not complying with GDPR or placing your primary replica in the EU, providing poor experiences for non-EU users.

Again, I don’t think GPDR requires this.

NoSQL

For example, NoSQL databases suffer from split-brain during partitions (i.e. availability events), with data that is impossible to reconcile. When partitions heal, you might have to make ugly decisions: which version of your customer’s data to you choose to discard? If two partitions received updates, it’s a lose-lose situation.

This paints all NoSQL databases with a broad brush. While some NoSQL databases are (were?) notorious for losing data, that is not inherent to NoSQL databases.

Certainly if you are using an AP NoSQL database, you need to design your application to correctly handle conflicts, use CRDT’s, or make idempotent writes. Partitions do happen, and it’s not trivial to handle them correctly, but neither is it the case that you always need to discard your customer’s data.

Sharded Relational Databases

Sharded Relational databases come in many shapes and suffer from as many different types of ailments when deployed across regions: some sacrifice replication and availability for consistency, some do the opposite.

I assume the author is referring to systems like Citus. I don’t have enough experience with systems like this to judge the assertion, but this seems fair.

Conclusion

If you do need more reliability/availability than is possible from a single region, then Cockroach is a strong option to consider. I think a far better argument for CockroachDB and against NoSQL, Replicated SQL, and Sharded Relational DBs is minimising complexity and developer time. It is possible for developers to design their application for the nuances of each of these databases, but it’s certainly not easy or cheap, especially if you want it to be correct under failure. The reason Google created Spanner (the inspiration for Cockroach) was that developers found it hard to build reliable systems with weak consistency models.

[…] It is much easier to reason about and write software for a database that supports strong consistency than for a database that only supports row-level consistency, entity-level consistency, or has no consistency guarantees at all. - Life of Cloud Spanner Reads & Writes

CockroachDB provides consistent reads and writes, supports SQL, is able to be deployed multi-region, and in any datacenter. Those are a compelling set of features. If your application can handle the latency and performance tradeoffs that it makes (which are getting better all the time), then it will let you write software against a consistent datastore without spending as much time reasoning about hard consistency problems. Cockroach is a great product, and I think it stands well on it’s merits.

Since Terraform v0.10, Terraform providers are distributed separately from the Terraform binary. This lets them update at different paces, and allows a wider group of people to collaborate on the providers. This is mostly good, but it does introduce a new step for upgrading providers. It is slightly counterintuitive, but to upgrade your providers, run

terraform init -upgrade

To upgrade your modules, run

terraform get -update

I was building VM images for Google Cloud with Packer, and provisioning them with Ansible. Everything had been working in the morning, but in the afternoon one computer wasn’t working after I had upgraded Ansible with Homebrew. I was having a really tough time figuring out why Ansible and Packer were running fine on one computer, and not on the other. I was getting the following error:

googlecompute: fatal: [default]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "SSH Error: data could not be sent to remote host \"127.0.0.1\". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh", "unreachable": true}

Investigating the error, I found it could indicate any number of problems, as Ansible is masking the underlying SSH error.

After checking the versions of Python, Ansible, and Packer on the two computers, I found one difference. On the computer that wasn’t working, when running ansible --version it had a config file listed:

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.3.2.0
  config file = /Users/<user>/.ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = Default w/o overrides
  python version = 2.7.13 (default, Dec 18 2016, 07:03:39) [GCC     4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1)]

Opening that file:

$ cat ~/.ansible.cfg
[ssh_connection]
pipelining = True

I moved that file to another location so it wouldn’t be picked up by Ansible, and after rerunning Packer a second time, got this error:

googlecompute: fatal: [default]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Warning: Permanently added '[127.0.0.1]:62684' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.\r\nReceived disconnect from 127.0.0.1 port 62684:2: too many authentication failures\r\nAuthentication failed.\r\n", "unreachable": true}

I then used the extra_arguments option for the Ansible provisioner to pass [ "-vvvv" ] to Ansible. I ran this on both computers and diffed the output. I saw that the dynamically generated key was being successfully provided on the working computer (after one other local key). On the failing computer I had many SSH keys that were being tried before I could get to the dynamic key, and I was getting locked out.

SSH servers only allow you to attempt to authenticate a certain number of times (six by default). All of your loaded keys will be tried before the dynamically generated key provided to Ansible. If you have too many SSH keys loaded in your ssh-agent, the Ansible provisioner may fail authentication.

Running ssh-add -D unloaded all of the keys from my ssh-agent, and meant that the dynamic key Packer was generating was provided first.

I hope this is helpful to someone else, and saves you from hours of debugging!

Postscript

I was very confused by seeing that my computer was trying to connect to 127.0.0.1, instead of the Google Cloud Platform VM. My best guess is that Packer/Google Cloud SDK proxies the connection from my computer to the VM.

While working on Deps I wanted to detect the user’s time zone at signup, to localise the times that I presented to them. I hunted around and found a variety of libraries that offer time zone detection, like moment.js, and jstz. However I wasn’t keen on pulling in a dependency on one of these libraries if I could help it, so I kept looking. I also considered trying to detect the user’s time zone from their IP address using something like the Maxmind GeoIP database, and that probably would have been the method I settled on.

However in my research, just before I started with IP based detection, I found that there is a newish Internationalization API, which will give you the user’s system time zone.

Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone
=> "Pacific/Auckland"

All current browsers support the Internationalization API including IE11. However there is a slight wrinkle to keep in mind when using it: on some older browser versions that do support Internationalization (IE <=11, and Firefox <=51), the timeZone property is set to undefined rather than the user’s actual time zone. As best as I can tell, at the time of writing (July 2017) all current browsers except for IE11 will return the user’s actual timezone. If you do need to support older browser environments then you could look at moment.js. It uses the newer Internationalization API when it is available, and falls back to other heuristics if it isn’t. For my purposes, my browser statistics show almost no IE usage, so I chose to just use the newer method, while also allowing the user to manually update their time zone if they needed.

Bryan Cantrill on integrity. Edited slightly for clarity and profanity:

We are on a collision course with the Amazon Principles […] What is going on? I’m losing my mind. The wheels are off, everyone has to get out of the car and this is why. All of these [expletive] leadership principles, from all these organisations, where is integrity? Damn it where’s integrity? Amazon has 14 leadership principles and integrity is not on it. [That’s] inexcusable. I’m sorry, if you’ve got one principle in your organisation, its integrity? Right? […] No we’re living in a world that has lost it’s [expletive] mind, I don’t understand it. Why the appetite for territory? Do you not know where your next meal is coming from? Do you not have a roof over your head? I mean I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. We have got an incredible luxury. There’s never been a labour market like this one. Where have we so screwed up with a generation, if not a society where we’ve got people who are so extrinsically motivated? What the [expletive] is wrong with us? I mean its like how is integrity not the only thing you have?

[Andrew Clay Shafer]: Are we doing the full critique of capitalism today?

No it’s not. Bullshit, it’s not capitalism. The finest capitalist is Scott McNealy, a capitalist so pure that when he was being devoured by Oracle he believed that it was his duty to capitalism to die, and I admire that. There is no purer a capitalist than Scott McNealy. And read McNealy’s final email to Sun employees, and it’s almost prescient, McNealy says: “You know what, in 30 years I never had to hide the newspaper from my children.” An achievement that Uber violated on like month two? Where are Travis’ parents? Are you not humiliated? How did you raise him to be so divorced from what really, actually, truly matters? What the living [expletive] is wrong with us? Maybe it’s me?

I continue to be impressed by Joyent, and Bryan Cantrill’s engineering principles. It sounds like a great place to do your best work.

Recorded at GOTO 2017 for an Arrested Devops episode: Old Geeks Yell At Cloud

Last week, there was a mailing list post on the clojure-dev mailing list noting that several of the new predicates in Clojure 1.9 alphas return true or nil. The three new predicates are: qualified-keyword?, qualified-ident?, and qualified-symbol?. Previously, all predicate functions in Clojure core, i.e. functions that end in a ? have returned true/false. In this post I want to examine the pros and cons of this new behaviour.

If I’ve missed anything here, please get in contact and I’ll update the post.

Pros to some predicates returning nil

• The main argument for some predicates returning nil is that the predicate still returns a falsy value. Idiomatic Clojure code usually doesn’t need to distinguish between nil and false.
• The docstrings for qualified-keyword? for example says: “Return true if x is a keyword with a namespace”. It doesn’t say anything about what happens if it doesn’t have a namespace, so returning nil or false are both technically valid interpretations.
• Not coercing the output from qualified-keyword? into a boolean is faster. On my computer qualified-keyword? takes roughly 3.5 ns to run, and a version that returns a boolean value takes around 6.5 ns. In absolute terms they are both pretty small though.

The first two points aren’t strong arguments for returning nil, rather they argue that it doesn’t matter whether the functions return nil or false.

Cons to some predicates returning nil:

• The biggest downside to this change is that it breaks a core convention that Clojure and the community has held around predicates, namely that any function ending in ? returns true or false. This is my biggest concern about the changes. You can find this expectation in:
  • Programming Clojure: “A predicate is a function that returns either true or false. In Clojure, it is idiomatic to name predicates with a trailing question mark, for example true?, false?, nil?, and zero?.” - Programming Clojure, 2nd Ed., Page 27.
  • Clojure’s own library coding standards: “Use ‘?’ suffix for predicates. N.B. - predicates return booleans”. That page also has the disclaimer: “Rules are made to be broken. Know the standards, but do not treat them as absolutes.”
  • The community Clojure Style Guide: “The names of predicate methods (methods that return a boolean value) should end in a question mark (e.g., even?).”
  • All of the Clojure standard library functions that end in a ? return a boolean value. Anyone learning Clojure would be justified in assuming that all functions that end in ? return a boolean value if that’s the convention they have always seen.
  • A mailing list thread on predicates in the aforementioned Programming Clojure book.
  • A mailing list thread about this exact question, whether all Clojure functions that end in ? should return a boolean value.
  • Tutorials Point: “Predicates are functions that evaluate a condition and provide a value of either true or false.”
  • StackOverflow on naming rules: “The main function naming conventions seem to be … Use ? to indicate a predicate that returns true or false: sequential?”

• The second biggest problem is that qualified-keyword? can return three values. “How is that?” you might be asking, “Didn’t you just say that the functions return true or nil?”. I thought so too. However as I was looking at the implementation of these functions, I realised that qualified-keyword? can return false as well, if not given a keyword. For example:

  user=> (qualified-keyword? ::abc)
  true
  user=> (qualified-keyword? :abc)
  nil
  user=> (qualified-keyword? 'abc)
  false
  

  It is fairly common to use group-by or juxt with a predicate function to partition a collection into two groups. If you use any of the new qualified* functions, you will end up with three groups. Based on Alex Miller’s tweet, it seems like this was considered and accepted.

• If these predicates are used at the boundaries of systems or in interop with Java, then it would be easy to forget that the qualified* predicates may return nil, and end up passing null into a Java method as a parameter when you meant to pass false. You could also return false under certain input when you expected the function to only return true or nil, or return nil when you were expecting the result to be a boolean. These kinds of bugs can be very subtle, especially with Clojure’s falsy handling.
• ClojureScript code is a lot smaller and enables more optimisations when it can guarantee that a boolean value is returned.
• Clojure gets similar benefits from the JVM when it can mark the function as returning a Boolean.
• Historically, Clojure has made a distinction between functions that return truthy and those that return true. There are predicate functions in core that return a truthy value like some and every-pred, but they don’t end in a ?. This change starts to dissolve that distinction.

Summary

Personally, I don’t see a strong reason to keep the current behaviour of the new qualified predicate functions, but you might see things differently. Whatever the outcome, I’m glad that in Clojure we don’t have to name all of our boolean functions with an “Eh” suffix.

Update

Alex Miller suggested to file a ticket about this behaviour, so I opened CLJ-2141.

Since my post a few days ago on the Uber-Alphabet lawsuit, there have been a few new developments.

Levandowski consulting for Uber

In that post I wrote:

… no funding appears to have been taken from Uber, or any other company (If there turn out to be payments from Uber to Otto prior to the acquisition then that would be Very Bad for Uber).

Not long after, Johana Bhuiyan at Recode posted a story which suggests that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick hired Otto CEO Anthony Levandowski as a consultant for Uber’s self-driving car around February-March 2016. Even after reading the article several times and sleeping on it, I still can’t quite believe it.

Now, sources are adding more to that claim. Kalanick hired Levandowski as a consultant to Uber’s fledgling self-driving effort as early as February 2016, six months before Levandowski publicly got his company off the ground, according to three sources.

If this was a legitimate business arrangement, the timing makes no sense at all. Levandowski had just left Waymo weeks earlier. While it might have been difficult for Alphabet to bring a lawsuit on these grounds, the optics for Levandowski advising Uber are terrible. Additionally, Uber and Otto are competitors in the self-driving vehicle space, and Uber is famously aggressive. That a CEO of one company would be advising one of their direct competitors within months of forming their own self-funded startup is truly strange.

If this wasn’t a legitimate business arrangement, then it also doesn’t make much sense purely because it looks so suspicious, especially in light of Alphabet’s trade secrets lawsuit. It brings the start of Uber’s direct involvement with Otto to within weeks of Otto being formed. If the plan all along was for Otto to join Uber, then it does make some kind of twisted sense for him to be advising the Uber self-driving car team.

A little birdie tells me that we haven’t seen the last on this particular thread of the story.

Naked Capitalism on Uber

Hubert Horan has just published another article in his series on Uber and whether it can ever increase overall economic welfare.

The answer is that Uber is attempting to implement an innovative and disruptive strategy for achieving market control — a strategy radical different from every prior tech oriented startup — but those disruptive innovations have nothing to do with technology or the efficient production of urban car services.

Otto purchased another Lidar company

A reader sent me a link to this article by Reuters discussing an acquisition of Tyto LIDAR. The title is “Uber’s self-driving unit quietly bought firm with tech at heart of Alphabet lawsuit”. The title isn’t accurate, as it was Otto that acquired Tyto (for an undisclosed sum) in May 2016. Uber then acquired Otto/Tyto in August 2016.

Levandowski: “We did not steal any Google IP”

Forbes published an article on 28 February, 2017 which contains part of an interview they did with Levandowski in October 2016.

Q: The question is, Google has been working on this for however many years. You guys (Otto) are a year old or something like that.

A: We started in January. How did we catch up?

We did not steal any Google IP. Just want to make sure, super clear on that. We built everything from scratch and we have all of the logs to make that—just to be super clear.

But this is my fourth autonomy stack. I did the DARPA Grand Challenge.

I wonder if “we have all of the logs” is also going to be Alphabet counsel’s opening argument?

If you’ve been following tech news over the last few weeks, you have probably seen several stories about Uber, all negative (bar this one about flying cars). I suspect that what is coming next will prove to be a far bigger story than all of the other incidents so far.

N.B. all of this article is sourced from filings and allegations that Alphabet has made, as well as reading between the lines. Uber will probably contest these claims in court.

Update: I’ve published some updates on the lawsuit. You can keep track of all the posts related to the Alphabet lawsuit here.

In the last few weeks Alphabet filed a lawsuit against Uber. Alphabet and Waymo (Alphabet’s self-driving car company) allege that Anthony Levandowski, an ex-Waymo manager, stole confidential and proprietary information from Waymo, then used it in his own self-driving truck startup, Otto. Uber acquired Otto in August 2016, so the suit was filed against Uber, not Otto.

This alone is a fairly explosive claim, but the subtext of Alphabet’s filing is an even bigger bombshell. Reading between the lines, (in my opinion) Alphabet is implying that Mr Levandowski arranged with Uber to:

1. Steal LiDAR and other self-driving component designs from Waymo
2. Start Otto as a plausible corporate vehicle for developing the self-driving technology
3. Acquire Otto for $680 million

Below, I’ll present the timeline of events, my interpretation, and some speculation on a possible (bad) outcome for Uber. The timeline references section numbers from Waymo’s amended filing, so you can read the full context yourself. You can also read the original filing.

Timeline of events

The main timeline of important events is as follows:

• Summer 2015 - Anthony Levandowski told Pierre-Yves Droz, a colleague at Waymo, that he had talked with an Uber executive about forming a self-driving car startup and that Uber would be interested in buying that startup. (Droz 28)
• November 17, 2015 - Levandowski registers a domain for 280 Systems, the company that would later become Otto. 280systems.com can be linked to a public email sent February 4, 2016 from someone with a 280systems.com email address looking to do testing of a semi truck with “specialized equipment”. (Filing 41)
• December 3, 2015 - Mr Levandowski searched the Alphabet intranet for instructions on how to access Waymo’s design server on his work laptop. Based on Gary Brown’s deposition (a Google forensic security engineer) this was an SVN server. (Brown 15)
• December 11, 2015 - Anthony Levandowski installed TortoiseSVN and downloaded 9.7 GB of data from the SVN repository. (Brown 17)
• December 14, 2015 - A USB card reader was attached to the laptop for eight hours. Google doesn’t appear to have logged what the laptop did over that time, but the implication is that data was copied from the laptop to a memory card. (Brown 18)
• December 18, 2015 - Levandowski reformatted his work laptop from Windows to Goobuntu (Google’s custom version of Ubuntu). This laptop wasn’t used again after December 21. To be fair, it was only used three times between March and November 2015. Presumably, he was still doing work during this time, just on another computer? (Brown 19, 20)
• January 4, 2016 - Levandowski downloaded five confidential technical Waymo documents from Google Drive to a personal device. (Brown 22)
• January 5, 2016 - Levandowski took a walk with Droz. In Pierre-Yves’ deposition, he claims that Levandowski “told him that he planned to ‘replicate’ Waymo’s technology at a new company he was forming.” (Droz 27)
• January 11, 2016 - Levandowski downloads another file from Google Drive relating to Waymo’s self-driving car development schedule and timeline. (Brown 23)
• January 14, 2016 - Levandowski was seen meeting at Uber’s headquarters and the news travelled back to Droz. Droz asked Levandowski about this, and he admitted he had met with Uber and was looking for investors for his new company. (Droz 29, Filing 48)
• January 15, 2016 - Levandowski officially forms 280 Systems (in stealth mode). Note that this was one day after his meeting with Uber. (Filing 49)
• January 27, 2016 - Levandowski resigns from Waymo without notice. (Filing 49)
• February 1, 2016 - Levandowski forms Otto Trucking (this is also in stealth mode). (Filing 49)
• Spring (March-May) 2016 - “Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of an acquisition … The two men would leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or competitors.” - Bloomberg. Update: I forgot about this article, but was reminded by hammock on Hacker News.

• May 17, 2016 - Otto launches out of stealth mode. As far as I can tell, they never took on any venture funding, instead self-funding (emphasis mine):

  Many of Otto’s founders have done well for themselves over the years, and it shows: the company is entirely self-funded right now without any external investment. (In the wake of the reported $1 billion Cruise Automation sale to General Motors, I ask Ron if the plan is to get acquired, but he’s insistent that they’re focused on bringing a product to market.) Even George Hotz’s scrappy upstart Comma.ai has recently taken on venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz. - The Verge

  In the photo for their announcement I count 35 people. By the time Otto was acquired, they had 91 employees. This seems like a lot of salary commitment to take on via self-funding by Otto’s four co-founders (all ex-Google). On the other hand, depending on the incentive pay they received at Google, they may have had plenty to cover several years of salaries between them.

• August 2016 - Levandowski received his final multi-million dollar payment from Google (presumably a deferred bonus?). (Filing 55)
• August 19, 2016 - Shortly after the final payment was awarded, Uber announced a deal to acquire Otto for $680 million. (Filing 55)
• Summer 2016 - Levandowski’s sudden resignation, Otto’s quick launch, and Uber’s subsequent acquisition of Otto caused Waymo to suspect that their IP had been misused. Waymo investigated this and discovered Levandowski’s actions prior to leaving. (Filing 57)
• December 13, 2016 - A Waymo employee was accidentally copied on an email from one of its LiDAR-component vendors titled OTTO FILES. The email contained a drawing of what appeared to be an Otto circuit board that resembled Waymo’s LiDAR board and shared several unique characteristics with it. (Filing 59)
• December 2016 to February 2017 - Waymo tried to obtain further information on whether Uber was using their LiDAR designs. This is also known as “Getting your ducks in a row”. (Filing 60)
• February 9, 2017 - A Nevada public records request turned up a filing Otto/Uber made that they were using an “in-house custom built 64-laser” LiDAR system. This was enough to confirm to Waymo that they Uber was using a LiDAR system with the same characteristics as Waymo’s. (Filing 61)
• February 23, 2017 - Alphabet makes their first filing against Uber.
• March 10, 2017 - Alphabet amends their filing, and asks for an injunction against Uber’s self-driving car program.

Implications

From Waymo’s filings, it seems that they have Levandowski dead to rights on stealing their LiDAR designs. That alone should be enough to bring Uber’s self-driving car program to a halt and cause some big problems for Levandowski. California’s Trade Secrets law is weaker than other states, but if successful, Waymo will be able to seek an injunction, damages, and attorney’s fees. Because all law is securities law, the SEC may also be able to bring a case against Uber (similarly to their case against Theranos).

I’m guessing, but I think the reason that Alphabet hasn’t directly accused Uber of conspiring with Levandowski is that they don’t have enough evidence. When they get to discovery, they will be looking for it. You would think that no-one would be dumb enough to send emails like that, but you would be wrong.

Several things suggest Otto’s intent to be acquired by Uber:

• Levandowski told Droz in the summer of 2015 that he had talked to an Uber executive about forming a self-driving car company and Uber acquiring them. This is a pretty clear signal!
• Levandowski formed 280 Systems the day after meeting with Uber executives and two weeks before leaving Waymo. He claimed he was talking to them about funding, but no funding appears to have been taken from Uber, or any other company (If there turn out to be payments from Uber to Otto prior to the acquisition then that would be Very Bad for Uber). The timing of Levandowski’s actions suggests certainty about something, and if it wasn’t funding, then what was it?
• According to a Bloomberg article in August 2016, Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski started talking about an acquisition in the Spring of 2016. Spring is usually defined as March-May, which sounds like they may have been talking about an acquisition before Otto had even been publicly unveiled. I’m a bit skeptical about Uber’s statements for this article, given Alphabet’s allegations, but it seems like a weird kind of detail to make up.
• That Otto hadn’t received funding from any VC’s is unusual. With 91 employees, getting paid $150k/year (this might even be too low given they are working on self-driving cars, one of the hottest spaces in tech right now), they would have had a $13.6 million/year burn rate just for salaries. Otto always aimed to get to market quickly, but getting to profitability without funding seems like it would have been very hard, especially on the accelerated timescale they were working towards and the need to likely hire many more people to get to production. All of Otto’s public self-driving car and truck competitors have taken venture funding. However, as someone working on a bootstrapped SaaS application, I’m sympathetic to wanting to self-fund. Update: Counterbalancing this point, it looks like Levandowski had previously sold three startups to Google for nearly $500 million. Those facts are somewhat in dispute, and it’s not clear how much he personally made from the sales. However it does seem plausible that he would have had enough cash to self-fund Otto with his co-founders.
• Otto was acquired only four months after their public launch. While it’s not that unusual for companies to be acquired quickly, it is still very quick, and for a lot of money.
• Uber has considerable internal self-driving car expertise. I’m speculating, but it seems likely that Uber would have found out (or should have found out) during due diligence, that Otto’s LiDAR system could not have been built and developed independently in the six months the company was operating. Updated: Otto purchased Tyto Lidar in 2016, so they may argue that their Lidar system came from Tyto.

There is no smoking gun email (yet), but there is a strong implication that Uber and Otto planned this from the start.

(Possible) Consequences

If this is true and can be proved in court, then it would be a massive blow to Uber. The worst case for Uber would be:

• Uber gets dealt an injunction on their self-driving car project. They have to start again, a long way behind other companies.
• Uber’s name is mud, they struggle to raise more money from investors, especially on good terms. Uber has raised at least $15 billion at a $68 billion valuation.
• Uber is currently losing money at $2-3 billion/year. Uber passengers only pay 41% of the cost of trips, with investor capital making up the difference. Update: I was wrong about Uber passengers only paying 41% of the cost of trips. I can’t find a publicly available number on how the trips are subsidised. Regardless, “Lose a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” Update 2: See the appendix for more details on this.
• With significant negative margins, no way to become profitable in sight, and a terrible media narrative after the Alphabet lawsuit, sexual harassment, aggressive/illegal behaviour, e.t.c., they cannot IPO.
• Because their self-driving car plans are still so far off, they can’t lower their costs to become revenue neutral.
• I suspect that a large part of Uber’s appeal is their low pricing. If they were to raise prices to cover their driver costs (not even covering the significant costs of their own operations), demand would dry up.
• Without any way to raise more money or reduce their costs, Uber runs out of money and folds.

This is admittedly the very worst case scenario for Uber, and there are lots of places along this downward trajectory that they could pull up from. If it’s proven that Uber intended to acquire Otto while Levandowski was at Google (this might be established more concretely in discovery), then it’s hard to see how Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick could keep his job. Uber has had a bad month, and it doesn’t look like things are going to be getting better any time soon.

Postscript

This post is made up of a mix of filings from Waymo, reading between the lines, and some speculation. Keep in mind these are all allegations and haven’t been proven in court. Please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes, and I’ll correct them.

I’d encourage you to go over the filings yourself, as they are very readable, and give a lot more context to the story than I was able to here.

Appendix

I originally posted that Uber was only charging 41% of the cost of the trips, based on this article which I misread. The 41% number is the total cost of the trip including driver compensation as well as corporate expenses.

Alyssa Vance sent me the calculations you would make to work out the farebox ratio:

Farebox ratio = fares / total cost of operations Total cost of operations = fares - profits Farebox ratio = fares / (fares - profits)

For 1H2015: Farebox ratio = 3,661 / (3,661 - -987) = 3661 / 4648 = 78.8%.