Each week, we discuss a different topic about Clojure and functional programming.

If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, tweet @clojuredesign, send an email to feedback@clojuredesign.club, or join the #clojuredesign-podcast channel on the Clojurians Slack.

This week, the topic is: "taking the REPL beyond your application". We free our REPL to explore and automate the world around us.

Our discussion includes:

• What are the different ways of working with the REPL?


• How can you be more productive by using the REPL?


• What is the connected editor?


• How to use the REPL beside writing code for your application.


• What is often missing from API docs.


• Moving from bash to Clojure.


• Using the REPL for exploration.


• What is a "fiddle" approach to using the REPL? What is it good for?


• Why should you use your editor for non-coding activities?


• How to save time when you're stuck with manual testing.


• Interacting with databases.


• When is the REPL better than a script?


• How a REPL is like a bash prompt, and how it's not.


• What supports the supporting activities of software development?


• Using the REPL as your application interface.


• Migrating data using the REPL.


• Why your REPL is a natural place for difficult to access resources.


• Why the REPL saves you from extra coding.

Selected quotes:

• "We share because we care."


• "The connected editor is an interface to productivity."


• "I like to call it whiplash-driven development because it's so fast that you literally have no time between when you write the code to when you execute it. You're just blown back by the productivity!"


• "This is a Clojure Podcast, so I bet you know where this is going."


• "The REPL as a window into another system."


• "I actually wrote the API, so I know how it should behave...but not how it does!"


• "Isn't that one of the goals of your programming language and experience: to spend less time doing the things that are really mundane and repetitive and more time actually doing new things?"


• "I don't want to just let that go into the history file. I want to save it someplace more important."


• "I have all of the power of Clojure before the query and then after the query. I don't have to trick psql to write that data out somewhere so I can read it in my REPL. It's already there!"


• "It's not that there aren't other ways to do this. That's not the point. The point is that all of a sudden you realize there's a lot of interactive exploration and processing and task automation you can do from the REPL because you don't need to write a script to do it."


• "You can just execute a form, and boom! It's off. It's running."


• "But then, I was like 'Wait, there's got to be a better way!' You know, infomercial style."


• "It's functional programming, so we're going to talk about composition. It'll happen."


• "Whoa! The REPL could be a terminal! A super powerful terminal into a vast warehouse of data, and I can slice it and dice it all sorts of different ways and discover things."


• "The REPL is just a way of doing structured execution very rapidly and very flexibly."


• "With the REPL, every function or form is a potential entry point. You can have all kinds of entry points."


• "The malleability of it is its power."

Links:

• REPL Series
  
  
  
  • Ep 012: Embrace the REPL
  
  
  • Ep 013: Connect the REPL
  
  
  • Ep 014: Fiddle with the REPL
  
  
  
  


• Composition Series
  
  
  
  • Ep 093: Waffle Cakes (first episode)
  
  
  • Ep 098: Composed Learnings (summary episode)
  
  
  
  


• Talks mentioned
  
  
  
  • "Running With Scissors: Live Coding With Data" by Stuart Halloway. Presented at Strange Loop 2018.
  
  
  • "Data Science in Clojure" by Soren Macbeth. Presented at Clojure/West 2015.
  
  
  
  


• Projects mentioned
  
  
  
  • Nate's tabl project
  
  
  • Nate's guide: Developing Clojure in Vim (2023 edition)
  
  
  • Conjure for Neovim
  
  
  • next.jdbc
  
  
  • Honey SQL