Moldable Live Programming for Clojure | Hacker News Reader

Moldable Live Programming for Clojure

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105 pointssimonpure13 comments

I've been using Clerk quite a bit lately and found it quite useful. Although I'm normally in a REPL loop, having control over the output ends up being very useful, and the ability to paginate long results, or graph them, it's great.

I'm also using it for some Clojure mentoring/training, so providing my mentees with runnable, changeable examples to explore jumpstarts their understanding.

I wish I could share images easily here; one of my exercises is looking for a solution to a chess puzzle on a 4x4 board. The board state is a map, but with a little meta-data, Clerk will present it as a 4x4 chess board (that is, there's a function that renders the board map to HTML which is presented).

Under the covers, Clerk is doing a lot of work to analyze each code block in a notebook, to determine dependencies so that it can efficiently recalculate changes and control execution ordering.

Ah so it’s not just rerunning too to bottom each time? It just works out changes and runs from there forward?

Yes, and it caches results on the file system, so results persist between executions AFAIK. That comes in handy for one of my notebooks that has to slurp up Splunk data for 20 minutes.

Nice, yeah, I am not a fan of retraining models on my workstation in the UK’s current heatwave.

Clerk has some pretty detailed documentation that is worth looking over: https://book.clerk.vision

Emmy and Clojure2d have also adopted clerk for their docs with impressive results: https://clojure2d.github.io/clojure2d/docs/notebooks/noteboo...

https://emmy.mentat.org

Thanks for the Emmy shout-out!

Clerk has been fantastic for rendering 2D and 3D... I just finished a 3D graphics API and am frankly blown away at how great Clerk made this experience.

Here are my recent 3D rendering "tester" Clerk notebooks (over MathBox), for fun:

- https://emmy-viewers.mentat.org/dev/examples/manifold/pq_kno...

- https://emmy-viewers.mentat.org/dev/examples/mathbox/functio...

- https://emmy-viewers.mentat.org/dev/examples/manifold/fdg

- https://emmy-viewers.mentat.org/dev/examples/manifold/pq_kno...

And another Clerk notebook with a bunch of calculus etc in 2D scenes, over Mafs.dev:

- https://emmy-viewers.mentat.org/dev/examples/mafs

Very cool stuff, thank you for your hard work on Emmy!

> [it eschews] Reproduction problems coming from out-of-order execution

Wouldn't immutability and lexical scoping go a long way here? What am I missing that would explain why notebook people (in general, not this project) have not long ago decided that exposing execution order is a bug?

I do like the idea of more hierarchical notebooks. Traditional top to bottom notebooks are a recipe for bugs and reproducibility issues, but so is working too much in the Clojure REPL so I’m surprised to hear it here. But obviously you need _some_ way to avoid reloading all data and retraining all models on every change.

There is an expectation of top to bottom, in-order execution from a notebook. The point of it being a "notebook" is that it's like a scientists journal where they write the equations, solve them, write notes on the solution, and proceed from there.

The execution order is implied from the skeuomorphism of the notebook form.

This is why the notebook paradigm is not generally suitable for software development. They're well suited to using code to get answers from data, for learning, and for trying things out. But you wouldn't use them for building your next SaaS product (unless that product is a site for hosting notebooks..., or you're making Mathematica).

Clerk is nice, but I'd like to point out Nextjournal offers a free-tier service and makes sharing and collaboration pretty effortless. It behaves like Clerk except it's "contenteditable", so to speak, and you don't need any local setup.

It's a really nice way to introduce people Clojure without needing them to download anything (not even a text editor) and get started playing with data.

Clojure is a cute lisp, and lisp is cute. So.. Double cute? (Even if I very much prefer CL, Clojure is still a comfy option nonetheless)

Fascinating!

Is there something simular for common lisp?

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