schema VS clojure-cli-config

Plumatic schema (https://github.com/plumatic/schema) , or friends I might be wrong, but I think schema might make more sense to you coming from the F# world (might be wrong)

This one? I didn't. I hear good things about it, and it's reached a point of maturity, being widely used in production.

Uhhh spec has existed for a long time and before that, schema Nowadays we also have the excellent malli. If his codebase is full of functions where the shape of the data isn’t obvious, isn’t documented and isn’t specified in a specific/schema, that’s on him and his bad coding practices and really no different from passing data in other dynamic languages. A class by itself (without additional effort) only gives you field names.

I don't understand this reputation either. There are very large systems built on other Lisps. For example, Emacs has a massive amount of Elisp. Elisp is much more primitive than Clojure, and traditionally libraries don't use e.g. data schemas [1] as runtime contracts for data.

Obviously, once a system built on top of a dynamic language grows beyond certain threshold, you need to be very disciplined as there are no static types to ensure some degree of correctness.

[1] https://github.com/plumatic/schema

Try to learn a schema library early, like Malli or Prismatic Schema. Do not mistook them as "static-typing" things - it's more for data validation and coercion than "security that things will get the right typing information". The idea to learn them early is how you'll shape future code: validating all "output data" first, them using that data inside your program without "defensive programming" like checking every time if a specific value on a map is nil, etc

In Clojure, declarative data specifications for validation and generation are also very mainstream. Schema was first out the door, Clojure Spec is the most popular library, while malli is gaining popularity fast at the moment.

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