clojure VS Metabase

5. Clojure - $96,381

I have a tangential question that is related to this cool new feature.

Warning: the question I ask comes from a part of my brain that is currently melted due to heavy thinking.

Context: I write a fair amount of Clojure, and in Lisps the code itself is a tree. Just like this F# parallel graph type-checker. In Lisps, one would use Macros to perform compile-time computation to accomplish something like this, I think.

More context: Idris2 allows for first class type-driven development, where the types are passed around and used to formally specify program behavior, even down to the value of a particular definition.

Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2?

Also related, is this similar to how HVM works with their "Interaction nets"?

https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://clojure.org/

I'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again.

As an analogy - my face hasn't changed all that much in a past few years, and I haven't changed my profile picture in those few years. Does it really mean that I'm unmaintained/dead?

> Where can I find latest documentation [...]?

The answer is still https://clojure.org/. And https://clojuredocs.org/ but it's community-maintained so might occasionally be missing some things right after they're released. E.g. as of this moment Clojure 1.11 is still not there since the maintainer of the website has some technical issues deploying the updated version of the website.

For me personally, the best API-level documentation is the source code.

> Where can I find [...] tools / libraries in a easy to use page or section?

There's no central repository of all the available things since they can be loaded from many places (Clojars, Maven Central, other Maven repositories, S3, Git, local files).

But there are community-maintained lists, like the one you've mentioned at https://www.clojure-toolbox.com (fully manual, AFAIK) or the one at https://phronmophobic.github.io/dewey/search.html (automated but only for GitHub). Perhaps there are others but I'm not familiar with them - most of the time, I myself don't find that much value in such services as I'm usually able to find things with a regular web search engine or ask the community when I need something in particular.

They are written in Java, and implement a bunch of interfaces, so the implementation looks complicated, but they are basically just classes with head and tail fields.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/cloju...

Like this.

As a Java/Scala user you should check out Clojure! It is highly recommended (https://clojure.org)

Lisp is not a programming language, but a family of languages ​​with many dialects. The most famous dialects include Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme and Racket. So after deciding that I was going to learn Lisp, I had to choose one of its dialects.

I learned Clojure to implement a plugin for Metabase (the tool my former company used for creating business dashboards). I probably won’t ever use the language anymore in the future, but learning functional programming was fun and eye-opening.

I thought you might be trolling. But then when I looked at the Clojure repo on Github https://github.com/clojure/clojure the last commit was 2 months back. There is some merit in your arguments.

Remote Code Execution via H2

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

(nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.

Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).