Defn Podcast Episode 30 – Bruce Hauman

by Juraj Martinka - Leave a Comment

This is a summary of the defn podcast interview with Bruce Hauman.

Once again, it’s been a great and long episode where Ray and Vijay talked to Bruce Hauman. You’ll find my notes below.

These are my notes to help me quickly review the key information. I might have misinterpreted something. I encourage you to listen to the full episode.

 

Summary

  • Name Hauman has German origin.
  • How he got to Clojure and Figwheel
    • He likes languages, parsing et al.
    • He has always had a passion for LISP – he was LISPer for a long time (since college).
    • In the real world, you work with Ruby, PHP, Java, etc.
      • As a result, he got sick and started to play with ClojureScript – there were quite a few rough edges and thus he created Figwheel.
    • Now Bruce lives in a typical apartment in Montreal.
    • ClojureScript doesn’t “encapsulate” functions and modules.
      • You can just load the file, and all your definitions are reloaded => very easy.
      • If you want to do stateful stuff like https://threejs.org/ it becomes problematic => you can turn auto-loading on and off with Figwheel.
    • Using Figwheel with Node.js is different.
      • You have no display and feedback is less visible.
  • Joke: he’s not a real programmer, he just build cool demos that make people think.
    • Figwheel is quite complicated real application written in Clojure.
  • He recently built some application with Clojure and Ethereum – that was a really cool experience.
  • Clojure as a strange maximum
    • He doesn’t see himself gravitating to other languages (although he loves languages a lot).
    • In terms of getting things done, he sees little benefits in using other languages.
  • Static types
    • The static guys are overblowing guarantee they’re getting from types – in real-world complex systems with lots of state (think “Microservices”) the benefits are diminished.
    • In Clojure we are very productive – look at Advent of Code and compare Clojure solutions to other languages.
    • Ray: certain types of functions would benefit from types but exploring external resources and APIs/data is much easier without types ceremony.
    • Racket, gradual typing, etc. (Vijay asked Bruce what he thinks about that and what’s his experience)
      • Paying upfront cost with types doesn’t make much sense to him because so much programming is about exploration – Bruce prefers to have the flexibility to explore.
  • Building new Clojure/ClojureScript app – what are his libraries/tools of choice?
    • Pick as few libraries as possible.
    • He (always) uses React for frontend applications.
    • He prefers Om style – passing state explicitly to downstream components instead of referencing global state.
      • But he didn’t do much ClojureScript development in the last year or so (e.g. re-frame got a lot better)
    • In lots of applications, you don’t need to make decisions about REST and GraphQL until you reach a certain size.
      • just pushing JSON data through APIs
      • If you know exactly what you’re building and how big it’s gonna be then it might be useful to pay that cost upfront.
  • Strictly-specking library
    • It was written mostly for the purpose of checking Figwheel/ClojureScript configuration options of which there are many and they’re easy to get wrong.
    • He started to write it in core.logic, then spec came out and he re-wrote it using spec.
      • Back then, spec was missing some features (it wasn’t so easy to get an exact pointer to the problem inside the input data structure).
      • After that, there were some improvements to spec which made his job easier.
  • Spec error messages
    • Concerning Clojure.core we’re talking about macros and special forms.
      • You get very detailed error messages – however, programming is a very incremental activity, and you just need a very brief and clear error message.
      • BUT, you can write a library that will match certain spec errors for core macros and output precise and clear user-facing error messages.
    • When saying “better error messages”, it helps to be a lot more precise what does that mean – e.g. “We need a concise error message along with a pointer to the start and the end of the relevant code.”
      • Unfortunately, that pointer is contextual – it depends on the file in which you are, etc.
    • Bruce really wants better error messages to bring more people to Clojure – that’s the reason why he is writing rebel-readline.
  • Devcards
    • All Bruce’s projects are focused on bringing Clojure interactivity to people.
    • When writing browser applications you always run in a broader context of the browser.
    • Devcards’ idea is that it should be easy to create independent pieces of an application and have them together.
  • Future (ideas about Fighweel and more)
    • Spec errors descriptions
    • Keeping statistics and visual history of errors and messages.
  • rebel-readline
    • Story
      • He does Advent of Code every year.
      • Working on programming projects let you reflect on our programming experience.
      • TIS 100 – assembly language programming  game – the easiest way to learn assembly programming again.
      • REPL is kind of a game – idea of building challenges in REPL; he never got too far with this.
    • Experienced Clojure programmers don’t need a great REPL experience, but beginners need it.
      • When you’re new to Clojure it’s impossible to choose an editor – everybody says: “Cursive, Emacs, Atom, …”
      • Ray: he struggled for one year or so to grasp the REPL – it’s really a superpower of Clojure and now he uses it all the time.
    • JLine provides a lot of functionality and makes things a lot easier.
    • rebel-readline is practically an editor, and you can put many features there, but it’s already great.
    • IPython-like notebooks
      • Not being in a file feels very constraining.
      • You can use Devcards as a graphical REPL in a browser, and you have your code in a file!
    • Reddit discussion: Pre-release of rebel-readline by Bruce Hauman! 😀
      • But the greatest benefit for me is that we can finally show newcomers an almost proper Clojure workflow without sending them to setup Emacs/vim/Cursive first.
    • crepl project idea
      • collaborative REPL
      • Nice idea but they eventually ran out of money.
      • Tmux can be used for shared typing into REPL but you can’t see who’s typing what and when he typed.
      • Joke: with Clojure we don’t need multiple people; we’re so productive that just one man is enough.
    • Bruce would like to have repl–readline ready for getting people’s feedback in a couple of weeks.
  • JavaScript experience
    • Bruce enjoyed JavaScript back in time because of its dynamic nature.
    • If he had a choice, he’d choose CoffeeScript.
  • Clojurists Together initiative
    • Figwheel is one of the sponsored projects.
    • It’s great; please join in and support Clojure open source projects!

 

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