clojureD 2019: "Our Journey from Elm and Elixir to Clojure" by Martin Kavalar

Martin Kavalar shares Nextjournal's experience rewriting their stack from Elm and Elixir to ClojureScript, Clojure, and Datomic.

The Big Rewrite is generally considered to be a bad idea. Our experience has been different. We would like to share how Clojure sneaked in through the front(-end) door and why we ultimately decided to go full-stack, from Datomic to ClojureScript. Nextjournal is an integrated notebook-like platform with a focus on long-term reproducibility. Our team consisted of five language polyglots with only one member having had prior Clojure experience. Starting out, we chose Elixir for the backend and Elm for the frontend. This talk explores the journey building the platform. Specifically: what made us switch the frontend from Elm to JavaScript and ultimately to ClojureScript how our desire to leverage immutability accross the stack made us switch the database from Postgres to Datomic and the website from Phoenix to Pedestal how we streamlined and simplified our application by rewriting the code executing runner from Elixir to Clojure how Clojure’s repl-based live programming workflow tightened our feedback loops and made us more productive how tools.deps and figwheel.main improved our workflows after a long journey of trial & error Attendees will learn about the priorities and tradeoffs in the Elm, Elixir and Clojure communities and their effect on newcomers.