Clojure

Reagent Mastermind

One of these days, a friend of mine posted about his experience writing the “Mastermind” game in React (in portuguese only). The game is quite simple:

  1. You have six possible colors
  2. A combination of 4 colors is chosen randomly (they can be repeated – for example, blue,blue,blue,blue is a valid combination) – you have to guess that number
  3. You have up to 10 guesses of 4 colors. For each color on the right position, you win a “black” point. For each color in the wrong position, you win a “white” point
  4. If you can’t guess on the 10th try, you loose.

So, first, we’ll create a shadow-cljs app – create a package.json file, fill it with {"name": "Mastermind"}, then run npm install shadow-cljs. Traditional stuff.

Then, we’ll create the shadow-cljs.edn file. It’ll only contain a single target (:browser), opening up a dev-http server so we can serve our code, and we’ll add reagent library dependency. I also added the material-ui dependency, but you don’t really need it for the code. Now, running npx shadow-cljs watch browser will start a webserver at port 3000, and we can start to develop things.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

ClojureScript vs clojure.core.async

I’m going to make a somewhat bold statement: core.async does not work with ClojureScript. And, in this post, I’m going to show some examples why this is true, at least for the current versions of core.async.

So let’s start by understanding a little bit about the runtime: Javascript is a single-threaded runtime that implicitly runs an event-loop. So, for example, when you ask to read a file, you can do it synchronously or asynchronously. If you decide to run in that asynchronously, it means that as soon as you issue the fs.readFile command, you need to register a callback and the control is returned to the “main thread”. It’ll keep running until it runs out of commands to execute, then the runtime will wait the result from the callback; when it returns, the function that you registered will be called with the file contents. When the function ends, the JS runtime will await to see if there’s any other pending call, and it’ll exit if there’s nothing else to do.

The same thing happens in browser environment, but in this case the callbacks are events from the DOM: like clicking on buttons or listening for changes in some elements. The same rules apply here: the runtime is single threaded and when something happens it will first execute everything that needs to be executed, then it will be called back with the event that happened.

So maybe we can change these callbacks with core.async channels right? But the answer is no, because core.asyncs go blocks will not run in different threads (because, again, the runtime is single-threaded). Instead, it creates a state machine and it’ll control of when each of these go blocks will be called, at what time, eventually replacing the event-loop that Javascript environment already have.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Ubiquitous interface – how to integrate things in Clojure

Inspired by this thread on Reddit, I decided to write a little bit about my experience integrating things in Clojure.

The first thing to understand is that Clojure have an ubiquitous interface: EDN. And it is important to understand what this means. In the beginning, I made this mistake of “Death By Specificity” on my now abandoned Relational project: to abstract things that don’t need to be abstracted.

But can we do even better? How about we de-abstract (concretize? Is this a real word?) things that are already abstracted?
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Strange decisions in Clojure – keyword inheritance

First, a disclaimer: the opinions on these posts are my own, and they reflect (for me) a design decision on the language that I don’t understand, specially considering other decisions that seems to contradict it. I also want to say that Clojure (and ClojureScript) is my favorite language, the one that I enjoy writing on my free time and professionally, so by no means this is a rant on the whole language!

Well, this is a new “series” on this blog: what is on the Clojure language that I don’t like, that I feel is out-of-place, and sometimes I can’t understand? In this first post, “keyword inheritance”. And what is that?

Clojure allows us to use derive to generate a “parent-child” inheritance against keywords. So, for example:

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(isa? ::dog ::animal) ; => false
(derive ::dog ::animal)
(isa? ::dog ::animal) ; => true

This will change the way multimethods work too: so, for example, if derive is used and a multimethod expects an ::animal and you send a ::dog, it’ll use the implementation for ::animal:

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(defmulti cry :type)
(defmethod cry ::animal [_] "Some animal crying")
 
(cry {:type ::wolf})
; Execution error (IllegalArgumentException) at user/eval152 (REPL:1).
; No method in multimethod 'cry' for dispatch value: :user/wolf
(cry {:type ::dog})
; => "Some animal crying"

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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Introduction to Kafka with Clojure

Recently I was trying to study Kafka, but I didn’t find a single resource that would give me a quick introduction and hands-on experience with it and Clojure. So, I’m making my own here! Don’t expect a “too deep introduction” – this is just the quick-and-dirty introduction about the concepts, and then I’ll show some code examples in Clojure

Kafka is a messaging system similar to RabbitMQ and SQS. The great differential is that it’s faster than both solutions, and works very well in cluster mode. Installing Kafka locally is quite complicated so you probably will wants to use the docker-compose.yaml file below:

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version: '2'
services:
  zookeeper:
    image: confluentinc/cp-zookeeper:5.3.1
    hostname: zookeeper
    container_name: zookeeper
    ports:
      - "2181:2181"
    environment:
      ZOOKEEPER_CLIENT_PORT: 2181
      ZOOKEEPER_TICK_TIME: 2000
  kafka:
    image: confluentinc/cp-enterprise-kafka:5.3.1
    hostname: broker
    container_name: broker
    depends_on:
      - zookeeper
    ports:
      - "9092:9092"
    environment:
      KAFKA_BROKER_ID: 1
      KAFKA_ZOOKEEPER_CONNECT: 'zookeeper:2181'
      KAFKA_LISTENER_SECURITY_PROTOCOL_MAP: PLAINTEXT:PLAINTEXT,PLAINTEXT_HOST:PLAINTEXT
      KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS: PLAINTEXT://broker:29092,PLAINTEXT_HOST://localhost:9092
      KAFKA_METRIC_REPORTERS: io.confluent.metrics.reporter.ConfluentMetricsReporter
      KAFKA_OFFSETS_TOPIC_REPLICATION_FACTOR: 1
      KAFKA_GROUP_INITIAL_REBALANCE_DELAY_MS: 0
      CONFLUENT_METRICS_REPORTER_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS: broker:29092
      CONFLUENT_METRICS_REPORTER_ZOOKEEPER_CONNECT: zookeeper:2181
      CONFLUENT_METRICS_REPORTER_TOPIC_REPLICAS: 1
      CONFLUENT_METRICS_ENABLE: 'true'
      CONFLUENT_SUPPORT_CUSTOMER_ID: 'anonymous'

This file will create the Kafka broker (like a single node of the messaging) and will add Zookeeper (that will allow you to coordinate between different Kafkas, decide which node is the leader, and also participate on the node election when the leader goes down, and other things). You will connect into 9092 port, and then listen and send messages from there.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Subtyping on functional languages

This is almost a new post on the Function SOLID series. It should be about the Liskov Substitution Princible, but before we talk about it it’s important to understand the concept of subtyping.

Subtyping in Dynamic languages like Clojure or in languages that do not have hierarchical typing like Haskell seems strange. But subtyping is not only a concept about object-oriented programming languages – it’s about restrictions, and the concept of variance. I’m going to try to explain both in this post

To begin with, we can say that a supertype is more generic than a subtype, but that’s not all. In truth, is all about properties that you can prove about a specific data. For example, if we use Clojure as a starting language you could say that the coll? is a property of maps and vectors, but vector? is a property that only applies to vectors. In practice, this means that coll? is a superclass of vector?.

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(coll? []) ; => true
(coll? {}) ; => true
 
(vector? []) ; => true
(vector? {}) ; => false

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By Maurício Szabo, ago

(check (my-code) => (needs :tests))

So, yesterday I made a talk (in Portuguese only, unfortunately) about the difficulties of testing Clojure and ClojureScript code. Specifically, I think the most problematic issue is the lack of “custom matcher libraries”, and how the default error messages are kinda bad and don’t help you identify the problems.

Then, on Clojurians’ #announcements Slack channel, I found that clojure.test Expectations library have a new version. So, why not integrate it on my Check library, and maybe continue developing it?

What is check?

Midje is too magic. Clojure.test is too little. Thinking about findind a “middle ground” I’ve started the “check” project, and I’m using it to test my personal projects like Chlorine, Clover, REPL-Tooling and Paprika. The problem is that, while the API is stable, but it still doesn’t do all the things I want.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Why I tend to avoid core.async?

It’s no surprise that I don’t like core.async very much. For starters, it make my functional composition looks like imperative programming again. There’s also multiple issues that you need to be aware of (like, don’t use async/put! because you will have problems, deadlocks that are difficult to predict, go blocks don’t compose over functions so you loose lots of helper macros like delay).

But the most important reason is that most of the time, I’m working in ClojureScript. And it’s impossible to migrate callback to core.async.

Well, you may be tempted to write something like:

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(js/someFunction "i'm async" "lol" #(async/put! some-channel %))

And one day or another you’ll have the dreadful Assert failed: No more than 1024 pending puts are allowed error. There are multiple ways around this problem, but none of then work if you can’t lose messages.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

Functional SOLID – Open/Closed Principle

Continuing on the series about SOLID principles on functional programming, the next one is the Open/Closed Principle. The definition from the Wikipedia:

The open/closed principle states “software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification”; that is, such an entity can allow its behavior to be extended without modifying its source code.

This is kinda interesting on its own way: what’s an “extension”? Considering the context when it was written, and future interpretations of the principle, the idea is that any program should not be re-compiled (re-written, modified, etc) to be extended. The idea of this principle is that local changes should not propagate to other parts of the program: make entities as self-contained as possible, write then in a way that extensions would not depend on modifications on these entities, then “close” then to modifications. I can see two cases for the “open-closed principle” violation, and the first one is the most common:

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(defn as-int [some-str]
  (when (re-matches #"\d+" some-str)
    (Integer/parseInt some-str)))

This code returns an Integer if it can parse a string as a number, and nil if it can’t. Now, suppose we want to “extend” this functionality by accepting other objects like Double (truncates to integer) or nil (returns 0). The only way to do it is to change the when to a case, but that means that for every new implementation I’ll have to change this function. Now, a better way is to use protocols:
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By Maurício Szabo, ago