Journal 2019.23 - 1.11, spec

Clojure 1.11 planning

Lately we’ve been starting to work on planning for Clojure 1.11. I’ve collected a list of possible features and problem areas and we’re starting to flesh those out a bit more and prioritize which things we’ll take on for 1.11. How does that list get made? It really pulls from a bunch of sources - ideas we’ve had brewing for a while, jira issues, ask.clojure issues, things people repeatedly have trouble with on Slack or other places, etc. Sometimes we’re also looking at affordances to work with other projects like spec, tools.deps, etc.

I’ve also been trolling through JIRA and building some new reports, re-prioritizing, and generally trying to make better queues that we can start working from when we get into that.

I’ve dusted off some of the old add-lib code and have been trying to sort through some of the known issues and think about how it could potentially be integrated into Clojure itself as a REPL-friendly API. Nothing really to talk about yet there.

Spec 2

Spec 2 has been kind of stalled out as Rich is thinking through some of the work we were doing on how to rework function specs and the use case of automating form/map versions of the specs.

In the meantime, you might be interested in a summary of Spec 2 changes that I did in my recent ClojuTRE talk. Speaking of which, ClojuTRE was great and I really enjoyed both Finland, and the conference. Definitely the best part was getting a chance to put names to all the European Clojure faces of people I know from Slack, etc.

Misc

I’ve done some maintenance work on the Contrib Jenkins infrastructure and helped with some releases of various libs and api docs over there.

I also reworked the clojure.org site build to run in GitHub Actions, which works great and has made this a bit less manual than it was. Starting to look at a few other places it might be useful.

Other stuff I enjoyed this week…

I’ve been reading Adam Savage’s book Every Tool’s a Hammer lately. Great book, but I am a long-time fan. Two years ago Adam spoke at Strange Loop and I got to interview him afterwards on stage. No video is available , but if you’re interested, check out the talk and interview transcripts.

Long-time readers have problably followed my Vulfpeck rantings in the past here. I sufficiently infected Rich Hickey that he went to the Vulfpeck show in Madison Square Garden recently and enjoyed it. #winning

Written on October 6, 2019