GoKawiilI recently had to design a new reference data system for the manufacturing domain. During the initial design stages we brought up the idea of using the Clojure programming language. Even if at first I was skeptical on deviating from the standard development stack, I gradually realized the value of taking advantage of the multpile opportunities offered by this language.
This blog post is a high level take on the use of the Clojure programming language and its introduction into my development stack. I will present here the points that guided the decision to use it over more conventional languages like Java.
First, What-is Clojure ?
Clojure is a dynamic functional programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine and which is a member of the Lisp family ( yes you heard it right, the very old one )
As a result, Clojure not only benefits all the well-known advantages of functional programming languages such as immutable data structures ( which I will not describe in this article ) but it also provides all the advantages related to its Lisp nature, such as code-as-data semantic.
In addition, the Clojure ecosystem provides a wide range of powerfull libraries and tools for manipulating data which makes it very convenient for prototyping complex data validation and transformation programs.
Clojure language is not a newcomer, it was created in 2007, but has been considered for many years as a "hobbyist" language used in very specific cases only, although it was intially designed with the objective of being multi-purpose and stable for business usage.
However reports tend to show a significant increase in the use of Clojure in enterprise in the recent years. I can mention the fact ThoughtWorks radar passed Clojure language to "adopted" since 2014, meaning Clojure position is an enterprise ready technology for quite a long time.
So why did I go for Clojure ?
A first element of decision lied in the fact that our product used a great number of data structures and business management rules which aim to evolve very frequently and be adapted to new business contexts over time.
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