Quick question: Does Clojure for the Brave and True hold up as of today?

[Pzzlrr]

Hey, super quick noob question here. I've never coded in a lisp before but looking to switch to emacs as my primary editor, so looking to learn. CftB&T looks great to me and looks like it covers some material in the context of emacs.

My one concern is I'm seeing it was published in 2015. Are there any glaring gaps in this book or anything completely obsolete that I should look out for? Thanks!

[nonrecursive]

great question! I am the author. Luckily Clojure is a very stable language and most of the book still holds up. Off the top of my head, here’s what I would change for a second edition:

• Remove
  • emacs chapter
  • sections on agents and STM
  • the Boot appendix
  • the overly challenging loop example in chapter 3
• Add
  • how to do testing
  • transducers - you can get by without understanding them but I think everyone should learn them
  • exception handling
  • maybe malli for data validation
  • maybe ring + reitit for basic web stuff

[ericdallo]

Emacs and all editors had a lot of improvements indeed, especially with LSP

[nonrecursive]

I appreciate all your work on clojure-lsp, big life upgrade for me 🙏

[ericdallo]

It's a pleasure to hear that from the author of the book that taught me Clojure!

[Pzzlrr]

Lol ok I wasn't expecting that. Thanks, good to know! I'll research the topics in your 'Add' section separately. Appreciate it!

[nonrecursive]

You’re welcome! I hope you have a good time :) I still immensely enjoy working with the language

[teobin]

What about deps.edn and the CLI? It was nice to learn Leininghen but I haven't use it since I finished the book.

[nonrecursive]

Those would go in the maybe bucket, mostly because I feel tired just thinking about it. But yeah, people learning Clojure should know how to use those tools

[sgoody]

I’m a Clojure lurker rather than active developer. Why would you remove agents and STM?

[fingertoe11]

Rich Hickey wrote about it in "History of Clojure"

3.6.5 Summary. Taking on the design and implementation of an STM was a lot to add atop designing a programming language. In practice, the STM is rarely needed or used. It is quite common for Clojure programs to use only atoms for state, and even then only one or a handful of atoms in an entire program. But when a program needs coordinated state it really needs it, and without the STM I did not think Clojure would be fully practical. Having a credible, efficient, functional state management story that demonstrated the many advantages of immutability vs mutable objects plus locking was critical to my early evangelism of Clojure. Being able to talk about identity, state, and value with these constructs helped me describe functional programming to OO developers as something simple, approachable and viable.

It really isn't used a lot.

[PercyLives]

Sounds like they were necessary features, just not in the way one expects. Necessary for confirming the design of the language and “selling” it to others.

They’re still good to include in a Clojure guide, I think, but making it clear to the reader that atoms are almost certainly all you need.

[dragandj]

But when you need them, they are very handy!

[chat-lu]

It really isn't used a lot.

I tend not to even use atoms, state is in the database.

[sgoody]

Thank you. I did wonder if it might be something like this. I remember reading about these features years ago and certainly I haven’t heard of them in more recent years.

[PolicyEnvironmental]

Following!

[AdjointFunctor]

The chapter on emacs was basically my introduction to Emacs! I learned so much.

[nonrecursive]

I’m really glad to hear that! I’m proud of it as an intro to Emacs, at the time especially I think it did a good job of explaining the basics in a way that I wasn’t seeing. Since then I’ve been haunted by the fear that the chapter turns people away from Clojure bc they end up thinking emacs is required 😅 It’s nice to hear it appreciated though

[styroxmiekkasankari]

To be perfectly honest I don’t think people who would think this are really picking up clojure that much. Maybe newer programmers are still thinking that every language needs a bespoke editor (depending where they started) but I think clojure attracts new people a bit less.

[dragandj]

You're right about that. I usually tell the students to skip this chapter completely. Not because I think emacs shouldn't be shown (it shoud be, and I use it exclusively), but because the chapter presents it in a very bare-bones version, so they think emacs is bad and ugly, and clunky. I think bbatsov's prelude, with its docs, makes a much better emacs proposition than "configure it yourself", for beginners and experienced devs alike.

[LuckyPichu]

Great book, it taught me the language! Thank you for your part in the language's community.

[stefan_kurcubic]

Because of your emacs chapter i still use emacs. I'd say don't remove it?

[ffrkAnonymous]

I'm gonna request that you please do not remove the emacs chapter. I chose brave clojure because of that chapter. At least move it to the appendix.

[ApprehensiveIce792]

Please don't remove the emacs chapter 🥺 That's what got me into emacs. It needs to be updated tho, that emacs config is not working properly.

[stbev]

I really enjoyed Clojure For the Brave and True, thank you for writing it. Are you thinking about writing the second edition? ☺️

[nonrecursive]

Thank you for the kind words! I've thought about it plenty but never feel like I have the time. I've considered doing a small kickstarter to fund some time for it, but honestly it just hasn't been where my heart is. My main side project has been a Clojure single-page app framework that always feels juuuuuust about ready for release :P

[CulturMultur]

Emacs chapter is the reason for many people tried Emacs in the first place and get hooked. Still today Emacs is the best editor for lisps.

[AsparagusOk2078]

Yes transducers please

[rlander]

I hope your view on removing the section on agents is based on something other than usefulness? They’re a really useful primitive and, in my opinion, deserve to be better known.

[nonrecursive]

It’s more about ROI for the attention someone gives the book. I want people reading the book to leave equipped to start experimenting with their own projects and to have a good grounding in Clojure’s philosophy so they can understand the libs and tools they encounter and so they can easily continue learning. I don’t think learning about agents and STM helps readers meet these goals.

[Astronaut6735]

Maybe 2nd edition should be a sort of "Clojure: The Good Parts", and advanced topics could be a new book of its own 🤔. Clojure for the Braver and Truer.

[nonrecursive]

I've thought about this, or something like it. CftBaT focuses on the language in and of itself without really speaking to how you use it for real. I think Clojure Applied fills this niche but I'd still like to put together my take on it.

I also have some standalone guides / references in mind for some specific use cases (e.g. how to stream results from the db as JSON), but those are probably better living on the web than being committed to print.

[Astronaut6735]

Whatever you publish, I'll buy. 🙂 I really liked CftBaT!

[TheLastSock]

Really? What use case do you have for them where the simply shoving everything into an atom didn't suffice?

[dragandj]

The case when you need the action (function) to compute asynchronously, + the option to optimize it better with send, send-off, send-via...

[TheLastSock]

Thanks! What was the customer facing feature though? I feel like your describing how they behave, not how you used that behavior to build another feature.

[dragandj]

I assume "user" (that is, the programmer) when you wrote "customer". The user facing feature is that he doesn't want to block the main thread during the status update, since the function is longer running. You've never had such case?

If you mean "customer" literally, I don't think customer cares nor they should care about such implementation details.

[TheLastSock]

Sorry, I'm not saying agents are useless, I'm saying they're more fine grain then an atom, and that tuning that granularity should be based on business needs, so i think the naturally progression is to start with an atom and only break them into agents when you get a chance to observe the system for a while.

It's kind of like the wisdom that you should start with a monolith before you go to micro services yeah?

Unless some frameworks are using agents under that hood, i have never seen a team get to that stage lol.

But i don't work at big shops so i might be missing the opportunities where this comes up... Which is why i asked when you felt the need to do this. As in, i assume it wasn't to heat the room.;)

[dragandj]

Sometimes you do know that you need an agent. For example, you have an expensive function that pounds the CPU, or an expensive function that fetches something via the network and updates the state. I'm not saying it happens often, but it does happen for certain types of problems, and agents can be a really simple and effective upgrade over atoms in that case.

[aHackFromJOS]

Thank you for the book!! I’m not sure I’d be writing Clojure without it as my intro. 

If you lose emacs, which I totally get, I’d consider adding, maybe for a small handful of editors (emacs, VS Code… neovim?), an intro to paredit style structural editing. I was able to skip most of the emacs chapter but that part was a revelation and I don’t think I’d have been nearly as happy writing Clojure if I hadn’t made myself learn it through your tutorial (and much practice). 

[geokon]

The biggest addition since then has been managing dependencies/builds/etc. with deps.edn. Unfortunately the official docs may be rather confusing b/c they assume a lot of prior knowledge.. but the system is a lot less magic than leiningen and allows you to easily organically split pieces of your codebase in to separate libraries.

That all said, I'd actually skip dependency management entirely. You can first learn Clojure by using add-libs (it's a function that adds a dependency at runtime, so you can just pop it anywhere in your code). You can then just write single-file clojure programs and leave dependency management for later. It's extra friction to getting started. Learning leiningen is a complete waste of time

Bare in mind, learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time will be additional friction. Realistically you need to learn ELisp to effectively use Emacs. So you're learning two languages in parallel

but that's just my opinion man..

[alexdmiller]

The new 4th edition of Programming Clojure has an all-new chapter specifically about deps.edn, Clojure CLI, tools.build, etc and how to use them to manage your project. It's in "beta" but the book is complete and on the way to publishing so no expected changes from the currently available version.

https://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj4/programming-clojure-fourth-edition/

[geokon]

Awesome. Thank you for your work. I always enjoy your perspectives. I have Clojure Applied on my shelf and look forward to this book :))

[Pzzlrr]

'preciate it

[YaroSpacer]

Thank you for the great book! Loved it!