dustingetz

Making Tools Developers Actually Use — Michiel Borkent

AI transcript

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Well, okay. I'm glad to be here. My name is Michiel Borkent, also known as Borkdude in the Clojure community. The title of my talk is "Making Tools Developers Actually Use," and some of my projects are actually used, so I'm going to mention those. Babashka, Clj-kondo, and Squint—I'll be revisiting those in the talk.

So at some point in time, Nikita Prokopov said on Twitter to Christophe Grand, who we all know, "I love Clojure. Why is Clojure not more popular?" And Christophe said, "My theory: it's really different than popular languages. Each major difference is a barrier to learning and adoption. So with any barrier, it's easy to see the problems in front of you but hard to see the benefits."

dustingetz

hi Jaret, while you are looking at datomic pro scripts - i want to donate the user interview setup scripts we wrote and have been using for a year or two. We also use them in our prod demo environments - CICD pipeline

This repo https://github.com/hyperfiddle/datomic-browser contains three scripts

• datomic_fixtures_mbrainz_full.sh
• datomic_fixtures.sh (todo rename to _mbrainz_small)
• run_datomic.sh

The value of these scripts is they get a prospective user from zero to working mbrainz instance in about 60 seconds, reliably and while under pressure, preventing a number of common mistakes, typos, issues and hurdles

• Downloading and extracting datomic

dustingetz

Datomic Entity Browser from Hyperfiddle – 30 second demo

20260115.datomic.entity.browser.30s.mp4

• 10 min Conj lightning talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmucZkE5gd0, and slides
• Transcript: https://share.descript.com/view/YD8iB3nh5cP
• Follow on twitter for updates: https://x.com/dustingetz/status/2011862061324640761
• Github - https://github.com/hyperfiddle/datomic-browser

dustingetz

Clojure namespace browser – Hyperfiddle example app

See source code below.

dustingetz

(ns dustingetz.y2025.gene2
  (:require [hyperfiddle.electric3 :as e]
            [hyperfiddle.electric-dom3 :as dom]
            [missionary.core :as m]))

(e/defn MyTextarea
  [v & {:keys [rows cols]
        :or {rows 10 cols 50}}]
  (dom/textarea (dom/props {:rows rows :cols cols :value v})
    ; this returns a stream of values

dustingetz

(ns dustingetz.edn-viewer0
  (:require [clojure.datafy :refer [datafy]]
            [clojure.core.protocols :refer [nav]]
            [contrib.data :refer [unqualify]]
            [dustingetz.easy-table :refer [TableScroll Load-css]]
            [dustingetz.flatten-document :refer [flatten-nested]]
            [hyperfiddle.electric3 :as e]
            [hyperfiddle.electric3-contrib :refer [Tap]]
            [hyperfiddle.electric-dom3 :as dom]
            [hyperfiddle.electric-forms0 :refer [Checkbox*]]

dustingetz

(ns hf-docs-site.demos.explorer
  (:require [clojure.datafy :refer [datafy]]
            [clojure.core.protocols :refer [nav]]
            #?(:clj clojure.java.io)
            [contrib.data :refer [treelister clamp-left]]
            [contrib.str :refer [includes-str?]]
            [contrib.datafy-fs #?(:clj :as :cljs :as-alias) fs]
            [hyperfiddle.electric3 :as e]
            [hyperfiddle.electric-dom3 :as dom]
            [hyperfiddle.electric-scroll0 :refer [Scroll-window IndexRing]]

dustingetz

(ns dustingetz.metaobject
  "https://github.com/NikolaySuslov/electric-objmodel"
  (:require [contrib.assert :refer [check]]
            [hyperfiddle.electric3 :as e]
            [hyperfiddle.electric-dom3 :as dom]
            [hyperfiddle.incseq :as i]))

(e/defn Some [xs] (first (e/as-vec xs)))

(e/defn Vtable-lookup [vtable mname]

dustingetz

(ns contrib.ui.remark
  (:require
    ;["@hyperfiddle/remark-generic-extensions/lib/browser.min" :as remark-generic-extensions] ; works in node
    [clojure.set]
    [clojure.string]
    ; Refrain from contrib imports so this is more suitable for userland
    [goog.object]
    [prop-types]                                            ; used as js/propTypes.object
    [reagent.core]
    ;[remark] ; works in node

dustingetz

References — Electric Clojure

Electric Clojure implements a form of arrowized continuous time dataflow programming with extensions for network-transparent function composition.

• The Haskell School of Music: From Signals to Symphonies (2018) — best starting point and also a great intro to Haskell.
• The Essence of Dataflow Programming (2006) great category theory overview of dataflow programming; missing Applicative (2008), Free monad and Cofree comonad
• Push-pull functional reactive programming, Elliot (2009)
• Breaking down FRP, Jane Street (2014) — good concise comparision of many FRP aspects; missing discussion of discrete vs continuous
• [Compiling to Categories, Elliott (2017)](http