04 April 2017
Welcome to the first in an ongoing series of interviews with companies using Clojure and ClojureScript!
This first interview is with Frédéric Vergez about his work at RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse), the Swiss national TV and radio broadcaster, and the national news website.
How long have you been working with Clojure and ClojureScript?
For the last 3 years with Clojure, a bit more than a year with ClojureScript.
How are you using Clojure and ClojureScript?
Mainly data processing and visualisation for news articles, maps, and web-services in the data-journalism domain. Some examples include a map of events during the 5 year period after the "Arab Spring" and $weethome, a "quality of life" simulator in Switzerland.
What libraries have you enjoyed working with the most?
We use a lot of libraries, but the most important ones would be:
core.async: everywhere, backend, front-end. It definitely changed the way we’re addressing concurrency/parallelism concerns, especially with ClojureScript
reagent: absolute must on frontend for SPA
incanter: really useful for data processing (we confess, we’re also using python)
cascalog: sometimes we’re not far from big data
enlive: we do scraping, a lot
We’re still evaluating clojure.spec, and use it mainly on backends. Also considering Datomic (still in early phases / P.O.C).
What about working with Clojure gives you the most value?
functional
pragmatism
readability
performance
one language/philosophy from backend to frontend
What is your favorite feature of Clojure/ClojureScript?
LISP
JVM/Node/V8/CLR : omnipresence
REPL based
Good IDE support
What is your stack?
Mainly based on AWS (S3, EC2, Beanstalk, EMR, RDS…) for backend. We use PostgreSQL and PostGIS a lot but are considering Datalog on some projects. We’re currently evaluating using AWS Lambda with Clojure, and seriously considering using it with ClojureScript + Node.
Why is using Clojure/ClojureScript valuable to your business?
sustainability
relative simplicity
coherence of the language/stack/community
time to market
fun!
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