A software engineer's essay recalls working at Runa, an early-stage startup that tried to offer dynamic pricing to small online retailers using Clojure and HBase, which never achieved the scale it expected and was eventually acquired by Staples mainly for its 'innovation' credentials before being shut down. The essay also describes a subsequent role at Factual, which built a global index of places using Java, embedded JavaScript, and later Clojure.
ideolalia.com
· 2026-10-28
In an October 12, 2026 post, writer Huahai responds to Rich Hickey's essay arguing that LLMs count as automation rather than tools because they can't be 'wielded.' Huahai counters that LLMs can be directed, corrected, and refined by users just like saws, chisels, compilers, or spreadsheets, and that unpredictability doesn't disqualify something from being a tool. The post argues that using an LLM well, through iterative feedback and judgment, requires genuine skill.
yyhh.org
· 2026-10-12
A developer argument circulating online contends that Clojure's live REPL environment is well suited to working with AI coding agents. The piece argues that because Clojure allows functions to be redefined in a running process without recompiling or losing state, both humans and AI agents can test and verify generated code far faster than in languages requiring full rebuilds. It also argues that Clojure's declarative, data-centric style maps better to the high-level reasoning that language models struggle with, compared to imperative code which models can already write well.
yogthos.net
· 2026-10-08
In an interview, CHICKEN Scheme maintainer and co-maintainer of the irregex library Peter Bex described his path from a childhood C64 into BASIC, C, and eventually Lisp/Scheme, which he studied at university through The Little Lisper/Schemer and SICP. He discussed his ongoing core contributions to CHICKEN Scheme, including numerical tower code, irregex upkeep, bug fixes and security patches, alongside broader topics like Scheme standardization, databases, and Clojure.
alexalejandre.com
· 2026-10-02
A blog post reflects on a 2014 hiring effort to find QA staff in Pune, India willing to learn Clojure to test a large SaaS backend, describing it as an example of avoiding the classic 'Secretary Problem' from Optimal Stopping Theory by not permanently rejecting candidates once passed over. The author, writing with colleague Mayank's case as the anecdote, contrasts this non-zero-sum hiring approach with what they describe as a currently brutal, post-ZIRP software hiring market in 2026.
evalapply.org
· 2026-09-22
A software developer shares an anecdotal pattern from years of code reviews: peers rarely object to map or filter functions, but frequently flag reduce as hard to read. The developer notes reduce appears far less often in codebases than similar array methods, despite personally preferring it.
evanhahn.com
· 2026-09-14
A developer's blog post examines a debate sparked by a talk on debugging a nine-month software bug, questioning whether 'simplicity' as commonly understood in tools like Unix pipelines actually prevents such problems. The author compares a Unix shell pipeline and an equivalent Clojure program for word-frequency counting, showing that while both appear simple on the surface, modifying either to preserve original word order reveals hidden complexity and rigidity in the Unix approach.
jyn.dev
· 2026-09-03
GoKawiil