clojure-cli-config VS ZIO

Programming Clojure 3rd edition does have some minimal coverage of the CLI but it just barely made it to publication and a lot has been added since. You might find the CLI guide (https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli) and CLI reference (https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli) to be helpful for some questions. The Practicalli guide (https://practical.li/clojure/) has a number of good pages and resources on repl, tools, and use.

Yeah this is grim.

There is https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn which solves this but it’s not linked to from any official docs which seems a miss to me. As well as the config and full documentation, it also comes with a video walking you through a demo of all the features.

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

When I'm looking for tooling related stuff I do always check practical.li (https://practical.li/clojure/) since it probably has a good, if terse, description and mostly has links to the good documentation (or at least the best available).

4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey

scala has 2 healthy and pretty complete lib ecosystems : check out typelevel and ZIO. Both are FP oriented, which might not be your cup of tea at first glance but I would encourage you to try em out ! Softest introduction would be to start with the typelevel cats library and build up from there. The excellent Scala with Cats will ease you softly into an FP mindset. It's a bit dated and for scala 2 only but translating to Scala 3 is a very good exercise if you feel so inclined !

Last but not least, Scala is currently the language with one of the best effect systems in my opinion (https://zio.dev/). Kotlin for example has copied the approach with https://arrow-kt.io/ which I think is great actually. But when comparing Scala and Kotlin here, Scala wins by a large margin, it is a completely different world. It's like building a highly concurrent system in Erlang vs C.

Of course, if you don't want to learn things like union types, traits/typeclasses and effects (similar to async/await but more powerful) you will be annoyed by Scala. But once you learned them, you can never go back.

ZIO

Links: - https://dotty.epfl.ch/ - https://scala-native.org/en/stable/ - https://www.scala-js.org/ - https://typelevel.org/ - https://zio.dev/ - https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/pull/3120 - https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/pull/16517 - https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/index.html - https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/ - https://scalameta.org/metals/ - https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatibility-intro.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/04/18/faster-scalajs-development-with-frontend-tooling.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html

For the Rx approach, The ZIO framework for Scala has a streaming API that can meet those sorts of requirements. e.g.

This tutorial will introduce how to build from scratch, a REST microservice using the ZIO framework, and examples of ZIO dependency injection, ZIO HTTP, JSON, JDBC, and others from the ZIO environment. The source code is available here

I use ZIO (http://zio.dev) for Scala which makes parallel programming trivial.

Wraps different styles of asynchronicity e.g. callbacks, futures, fibers into one coherent model. And has excellent resource management so you can be sure that when you are forking a task that it will always clean up after itself.

Have yet to see anything that comes close whilst still being practical i.e. you can leverage the very large ecosystem of Java libraries.

The one advantage Rust has over Scala is that it detects data races at compile time, and that's a big time saver if you use low level thread synchronization. However, if you write pure FP code with ZIO or Cats Effect that's basically a non-issue anyway.