Love Letter To Clojure: And A Datomic Experience Report - Gene Kim

Gene Kim shares his love letter to Clojure, highlighting its strengths and his experience with Datomic, a database that eased fears and provided performance improvements for his software development projects.

Key takeaways
  • Gene Kim’s love letter to Clojure is a reflection of his experiences with the language and its ecosystem.
  • Clojure is extensible and has a strong community that aids in learning and growth.
  • Gene Kim initially struggled with MySQL and was intimidated but found that Datomic eased his fears.
  • Gene Kim was amazed by the performance improvements Datomic provided, and it allowed him to analyze a Twitter relationship graph efficiently.
  • Gen Kim found that working with Datomic led to a better understanding of databases and their role in the software development process.
  • Gene Kim believes that Datomic is a good example of how functional programming principles can be applied in everyday coding scenarios.
  • He also emphasized the importance of locality and simplicity in software design.
  • Gene Kim’s experience with Clojure shows that, with persistence and the right resources, anyone can learn and grow with a new language and ecosystem.
  • He is grateful to the Clojure community for its support and recognizes that it is essential for developers to be surrounded by platform agnostic tools to achieve high performance.
  • Gene Kim encourages developers to be resilient and to learn from their mistakes, as it is the key to achieving success in software development.
  • In reference to databases, Gene Kim said that schema changes were not frightening with Datomic and allowed him to focus on the application logic.
  • Datomic’s performance and scalability eased his fears about using it, and he found that it was easy to learn from his mistakes and improve his code.
  • Gene Kim believes that learning new concepts and tools should be a continuous process, and he encourages developers to embrace the unknown and to be open to learning from others.