SHshaunparker·Aug 9, 2018
I don't find that too surprising, Rich tends to let things bake internally (in his head and at Cognitect) for a while before releasing anything publicly for consumption and feedback.
Most of Clojure's current development is around tooling [1] and some changes to move clojure.spec out of alpha. I believe they want to accomplish this for 1.10, but I'm not sure where I remember hearing that.
Alex Miller has mentioned that Cognitect built and continues to work on a tool that tracks all of your functions with spec definitions and generatively tests them only when the function or one of its dependencies changes. This would be extremely helpful since generative testing can be expensive to run, especially if you want to generate huge amounts of test cases. It'd be nice to say "test all of my codebase's functions 10 million times" and then have th
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at information stored locally with the code.
In Rich's "Effective Programs" talk [2] he outlines the "10x problems" that Clojure was targeted at solving. In it there are two 10x problems that weren't solved by Clojure: resource utilization and libraries. There's not much Clojure can do to solve resource utilization as it's dependent on the host (JVM), but the library problem (especially Clojure libraries with spec definitions) is solvable (though there seems to be some disagreement on whether only allowing growth in libraries in a practical).
Pure speculation: All of their tooling projects (spec, codec, tool.deps, and the above mentioned generative test runner/tracker) are going to come together in a tool that attempts solves the library dependency problem. Rich outlines a lot of his thinking about how to accomplish this in his "Spec-ulation" talk [3]. He wants Clojure to "become the first community to make [dependencies] great". I hope that we'll see more tools and guidance from the Clojure team on this soon (and maybe improved out-of-the-box error messages)!
[1] https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha
[2] https://youtu.be/2V1FtfBDsLU?t=29m53s
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk