Libraries

There are times when a specific piece of technology captures my attention in such a way that I feel the need to study more, and do things with it. Since I began to study Clojure, and after two jobs working with it, I’m still in love with it – I think it matches what I expect in a language most of the time, and also matches my repl-driven-development workflow.

So why I’m not considering it for new projects? Even personal ones?

When I need to prototype something really fast, I end up going for Ruby, with Sinatra (sorry rails, but you’re a terrible choice for me). I saw that in my last project, I worked with Sequel, postgresql, and Sinatra. For tests, I used VCR and recorded the external api calls that I had to make.

Well, I could probably prototype a simple VCR that would record a specific function call in Clojure. Sinatra, I could use Compojure. As for Sequel… Or ActiveRecord, for that matter…

There are a few libraries that can be used to communicate with SQL: Korma, that doesn’t support select ... for update and have some implicit connection problems and other issues, HoneySQL that interprets Clojure maps and converts then to SQL, and lots of other libraries that simply ask you to write your query and then, somehow, call then for you. I didn’t care too much for the later, after all, if I want to write queries I prefer to not depend on a library that does it to me – I know that there are people that don’t like to have SQL in the middle of the code, but I don’t see any problem with it.
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