1. Clojure’s killer design
decisions
3 key decisions that boosted Clojure adoption and maturity
Luca Grulla - VP Engineering, Signal Media
Functional Meetup, London Sept 2018

2. There are “killer” decisions that boost a language
maturity and adoption

3. Maturity
1959 20171985 1990 1995 2007 2011
Cobol C++ Haskell Java Clojure Kotlin Rust
1958
Lisp

4. Adoption: 2018 top 20 languages

5. Clojure’s 3 killer design decisions

6. 1. Solve everyday problems

7. 1 - Solve everyday problems
● Boilerplate code
○ Lisp + FP + dynamic => small core and a terse syntax
● Concurrency & parallelism
○ Immutable data structure for simpler concurrency
○ Great primitives for parallelism

8. 2. Hosted on JVM

9. 2 - Hosted on JVM
● “Use a runtime that people accept”
○ The JVM is loved and trusted by Ops and Security teams
● “Use other’s people code”
○ Interoperability with the VAST Java ecosystem
● Focus on the language, not the runtime
○ Bet on JVM performance and on the continuous improvement of it

10. 3. Effective governance

11. 3 - Effective governance (BDFL)
● Significant innovations within the first 10 years
○ core.async
○ transducers
○ clojure.spec
● Open minded about adopting ideas from other communities/initiatives
○ clojure.spec⇔ RDF and Prismatic’s Schema
○ core.async⇔ Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) ⇔ Go
○ core.typed

12. From design decisions to principles
1. Focus on your community
a. Solve everyday problems
2. Be aware of the operational aspects
a. Hosted on JVM
3. Keep innovating
a. Effective governance

13. Questions?
https://www.lucagrulla.com
Signal Media is hiring!
https://signalmedia.co/solve-big-challenges/