lacinia VS Light Table

Very specific example, but Lacinia, the primary GraphQL open source library used for Clojure apps, was developed by a guy at Walmart Labs. (He has since moved on though.)

https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia What I know about tech at Walmart is the Clojure lib above, which is the de facto graphql lib for the language today. Point being that tech existed for a while before big tech, and imo is going to be ever more present in more sectors of the economy. MAANG seems most relevant today in the capacities they gain from the amount of data they collect, and the importance of AWS for infrastructure (unless that's overrated, as it's starting to look like it is). What I know for sure is that the obsession with big tech as a representation of tech as a whole gives a distorted picture of things. Getting closer to reality in this matter is one big challenge.

There are some Clojure-ecosystems things that are pretty cool, too, that you'd probably miss going into Haskell. lacinia is an extremely cool GraphQL library, and there are a variety of interesting datalog-based datastores which are spiritual descendents of Datomic, notably xtdb (formerly crux) and datalevin. Also as noted, you can write the front-end in ClojureScript if you want to, and there are a lot of cool libraries for that as well.

Now, I noticed a ways back that Clojure 1.0 added the tap> function, and I vaguely knew it would be helpful for this kind of thing; I finally got around to trying it out to debug some hairy NullPointerException bugs in Lacinia.

Part of this was due to some inefficiencies in Lacinia, since corrected, but we also found other hot-spots specific to our application's code.

https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

Looks like the project has been archived

I think LightTable development stalled out when the original creator left the project in 2015. Likely the project was too ambitious and maybe ahead of its time. Or maybe Clojure was not the right language to build an IDE...

I think the closest we got to a closure of Light Table is this: https://chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/

Which includes:

> Light Table will continue to go on strong. We haven’t talked too much about it lately, but it’s used by tens of thousands of people and still growing. We use it every day to help us build Eve and thanks to the awesome people in the community that has sprung up around it, it gets better every week.

Judging by GitHub contribution data (https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...), it seems there has only been 25 commits (from one author) since Sep 20, 2019.

Light Table - A customizable editor with instant feedback and showing data values flow through your code.

Most IDEs nowadays are as extensible as Emacs is, but most people don't think of them as app platforms, they think of them as IDEs, so they don't bother craeting Email or IRC clients for their IDEs: - Racket's own DrRacket IDE is pretty extensible, although no one seems to try to extend it with apps like Magit, Org-Mode, Calc, or whatever other useful features that Emacs provides. It is theoretically possible, but it just hasn't happened yet. - LightTable is a powerful programming editor written and extensible in Clojure. - Gnome's Gedit can be scripted in Python.

I think it would be better to create an Emacs Lisp interpreter in Clojure for the LightTable editor.

It looks like it's not completely abandoned, at least. https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/discussions/2506

I'm no Bozhidar, but thought I'd share some links you might find interesting:

- https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable - Clojure editor made in Clojure, not sure if it's being maintained anymore, core authors moved on to a different project if I remember correctly.

- https://github.com/mogenslund/liquid - Clojure editor made in Clojure, fairly new and basic but has a pretty tight integration with Clojure (itself really) which makes it interesting and it can also be embedded into other applications (or embed your other applications into Liquid)

- https://github.com/Olical/conjure - My daily driver for Clojure development. Is not an editor by itself, but it's written in Clojure, and exposed to neovim as a vim plugin. Not only supports Clojure, but also Fennel, Janet and Racket so far. Pretty handy if you sometimes like to dive into Clojure-like languages that are not Clojure (or Racket).