Adam Tornhill - Transforming Software Evolution: Lessons from 10 Years of Clojure in Production

Adam Tornhill shares architectural and design lessons learned from building and evolving CodeScene with Clojure over a decade.

Lisp has been around for six decades, promising simplicity and expressive power. Yet, despite its reputation as a secret weapon for developer productivity, it never broke into the mainstream. A decade ago, we placed a bold bet on its modern descendant -- Clojure -- to build a platform that tackles one of the industry's toughest challenges: technical debt. But did the promise of Lisp and functional programming translate into real productivity gains? And more importantly, how can you leverage the same advantages? In this talk, Adam Tornhill shares lessons from a decade of building and evolving CodeScene. We'll explore key technical concepts like programs that write programs, embedded domain-specific languages, effortless parallelism, and the power of multi-methods for clean design. You'll see that this decades-old technology still holds tricks modern languages have yet to catch up with. But this isn't just about technology -- it's about impact. You'll learn how Clojure enabled a small Swedish company to outperform competitors with 20 times the engineering power. Whether you're a seasoned programmer, a skeptic, or just curious about how technology choices shape innovation and engineering culture, this session will add a new perspective. Perhaps you'll even place your own bet on Clojure. Connect with us! Website: oredev.org LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/oredev Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/oredev.org Facebook: facebook.com/oredev Instagram: instagram.com/oredev/