Every once in a while someone asks on the Clojure group
why (contains? [:a :b :c] :a) returns false. In the following heated
discussions about semantics (yeah! a discussion about semantics!) people
always suggest to add a linear-search to Clojure. What they miss:
linear-search is already there.
Clojure is a dynamic programming language. This is a huge plus in my opinion. It really makes fast development easy. Especially when fishing in troubled waters for a rapid prototype (or when you are a lone fighter).
However dynamic behaviour usually comes at a runtime cost. Clojure
provides several means to gain speed at cost of its dynamic nature. One
example are type hints. Another – not so obvious – example are inline
definitions of protocol functions in a defrecord. What are the
trade-offs? And what should be the default?
Last week, I had the chance of attending the Clojure dojo at the Thoughtworks office in London. It was great to see so many people enjoying to work with Clojure. Unfortunately chances are rather low to put up something similar here in the Rhein-Main region. sigh
However, what I really want to talk about is a question which arose during the dojo. In fact this question has been raised several times and I think it can't hurt to shed some more light on this issue: „How to order the arguments of your functions?“
In our todays installment of my little „Did you know“-series we won't look at Clojure itself but an important infrastructure topic.
The Clojure ecosystem is growing steadily. New libraries spawn every day. This is a Good Thing™. Tools like maven, gradle, leiningen and ivy make life easier for the developer who intends to use these new libraries. However library developers should pay attention to some details.
ClojureCheck is back.
It brings specification based testing to Clojure and integrates
(almost) seamless with clojure.test. So what does specification
based testing mean and how does it help you?
