Adopting Clojure

Abstract

You have heard about Clojure, and maybe even kicked the tires on a hobby project. Now you are ready to think seriously about adoption. What is it like adopting Clojure for your business? What are the benefits and opportunities? What happens later, as projects get bigger? Who else is adopting Clojure, and why? This talk explores Clojure from the perspective of a potential adopter.

We begin with the benefits of Clojure that are immediately visible to beginners:

• concision: write programs 5-10x smaller than before
• robustness: easily write programs that work correctly
• generality: use the sample simple ideas over and over, instead of masses and masses of redundant classes
• agility: add new capabilities with ease

That is a powerful story in itself, but the advantages of Clojure increase with expertise. We will tour just a few of the power tools used Clojure experts:

• core.async for communicating sequential processes
• transducers for programmable algorithmic transformations
• PigPen for big data map/reduce
• Datomic for flexible, ACID data of record

Finally, we will look at what everybody else is saying, reporting on business and open source projects using Clojure.

Resources

• Slides from Nov 2014