Intro
As promised this is first in a series of posts elaborating on integration of Clojure with Z2. It probably looks like a strange mix, however I believe it’s extremely empowering combination of two technologies sharing lots of design philosophy. Clojure has brought me lots of joy by enabling me to achieve much more in my hobby projects and I see how the combination of z2 and Clojure further extends the horizon of what’s possible. I’d be happy if I manage to help other people give it a try and benefit in the same way I did.
The LISP universe is very different one. It’s hard to convince someone with zero previous experience to look at the strange thing with tons of parentheses written using polish notation, so I am going to share my personal story and hope it resonates with you. I will focus on the experience or how I “felt” about it. There is enough theory and intellectual knowledge on the internet already and I will link to it where appropriate.
So, given this is clearly personal and subjective view, let’s put in some context.
Short Bio
I’ve been using Java professionally for 12+ years. Predominantly in the backend. I’ve worked on application servers, as well as on business applications in large, medium and small organizations. Spring is also something I have been heavily relying on in the last 8 years. Same goes for maven. I’ve used JBoss and done bit of application server development myself, but when Spring Boot came up I fell in love with it.
Like every other engineer out there my major struggle through the years have been to manage the complexity. The inherent complexity of the business problem we have to solve plus the accidental complexity added by our tools, our poor understanding of the problem domain and our limited conceptual vocabulary. I have been crushed more than once under the weight of that complexity. Often my own and the team’s share would be more than 50%. I have seen firsthand how poorly groomed code base ends up in state where the next feature is just not possible. This has real business impact.
The most scary thing about complexity is that it grows exponentially with size. This is why I strongly subscribe to the “code is liability” worldview. Same goes for organizations. The slimmer you are the faster and further you can go.
Ways to deal with complexity
Now that the antagonist is clearly labeled, let’s focus on my survival kit.
#1 Modularization
One powerful way to get on top of complexity is divide and conquer by using modularization. This is where z2 comes into the game. It has other benefits as well, but I would put it’s modularization capabilities as feature #1. Maven and Spring have been doing that for me through the years. On more coarse level Tomcat and JBoss provide some modularization facilities as well, however it is extremely rare in my experience where they are deliberately exploited.
Getting modularization right is hard on both ends:
- The framework has to strike a balance between exercising control and enabling extensibility, otherwise it becomes impractical.
- The component developers still have to think hard and define boundaries of “things” while using the framework idioms with mastery. I haven’t met yet technology that removes this need. It’s all about methodology and concepts (I dislike the pattern cult).
Discussing more precise definition of what exactly is modularization and why the well-known methodologies are too general to be useless as recipes is too big of discussion for here.
My claim is that z2 strikes the best balance I have seen so far while employing very powerful concept.
#2 Abstractions
Another powerful way is to use better abstractions. While modularization puts structure in chaos, the right abstractions reduce the amount of code and other artifacts, hence the potential for chaos. Just like any other thing, all abstractions are not made equal and I assume they can be ordered according to their power.
My personal definition for power: if abstraction A allows you to achieve the same result with less code than abstraction B then it’s more powerful. Of course reality is much more hairy than this. You have to account for abstraction’s implementation, investment in learning, long term maintenance costs & so on.
Alternative definition: if abstraction A allows you to get further in terms of project size and complexity (before the project collapses) it’s more powerful.
The abstractions we use on daily basis are strongly influenced by the language. Language can encourage, discourage (due ergonomics) or even blacklist an abstraction by having no native support for it. My claim here is that the Java language designers have made some very limiting choices and this has profound effect on the overall productivity as well as the potential access to new abstractions. Clojure, on the other side has excellent mix right out of the box with convenient access to very wide range of other abstractions.
The OO vs. FP discussion deserves special attention and will get it. I won’t claim that Clojure is perfect, far from it. However the difference in power I have experienced is significant and big part of that difference is due to carefully picked set of base abstractions implemented in very pragmatic way.
 So, what’s next?
Next comes the story how Java and DDD helped me survive and how JavaScript made me feel like a fool for wasting so many hours slicing problems the wrong way and worrying about insignificant things. Clojure will show up as well, you can count on this.
While you wait for the next portion, here are two links that have influenced heavily my current thinking:
- Beating the averages — the blub paradox has been an eye opening concept for me. I have read this article in 2008 for the first time and kept coming back to it. It validated my innate tendency to be constantly dissatisfied with how things are and look for something better. Paradoxically, it never made me try out LISP 🙂
- Simple made easy — This is the presentation that among other side effects made me give Clojure a chance. This presentation probably has the best return of investment for an hour spent in front of the screen.
z the world 