kam

one of those blogs

Clojure universe is mostly built on top of libraries rather than “frameworks” or “platforms”, which makes it really flexible and lots of fun to work with. Any library can be swapped, contributed to, or even created from scratch.

There are several things that make libraries great. The quality of its solution is of course the main focus which delivers the most value, but there are others. The one I’d like to mention is not how much a library does, but how little it should.

Dependencies are often overlooked when developing libraries. There are quite a few libraries that suffer from depending on something for either convenience, or for its built in example, or just in case, etc.

This results in downloading the whole maven repository when working on the project that depends on just a few of such libraries.

This also could create conflicts between the dependencies libraries bring and the real project required dependencies.

We can do better, and we should.

The reason I bring it up is not because I am tired of these libraries, or it is time for a rant, but it is simply because I do it myself. And usually by the time I notice I did it, it requires significant rework to make sure developers that use/depend on my libraries do not bring “apples” that I like and they might not.

A great example of this is me including an excellent clojure/tools.logging as a top level dependency of mount. Mount manages application state lifecycle, and it would only make sense if every time a state is started or stopped, mount would log it:

dev=> (mount/start)
14:34:10.813 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - >> starting..  app-config
14:34:10.814 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - >> starting..  conn
14:34:10.838 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - >> starting..  nyse-app
14:34:10.844 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - >> starting..  nrepl
:started
 
dev=> (mount/stop-except #'app.www/nyse-app)
14:34:47.766 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - << stopping..  nrepl
14:34:47.766 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - << stopping..  conn
14:34:47.766 [nREPL-worker-0] INFO  mount.core - << stopping..  app-config
:stopped

It’s useful, right? Of course it is. As a developer that depends on mount, you don’t have to do it, it is already there for you, very informative and clean.

But here is the catch:

* what if you don’t like the way it logs it?
* what if you don’t want it to log at all?
* what if you use a different library for logging?
* etc..

In other words: “what if you don’t like or need apples and you eat bananas instead?”.

It ends up that “useful” is most of the time a red flag. Stop and think whether this “useful” feature is really the core piece of functionality, or is a bolted on “nice to have”.

While it is not desired to have extra dependencies, and the above idea to include logging was not great, what was great are new thoughts during refactoring:

“Ok, I’ll remove logging, but now mount users won’t know anything about states..”

“Maybe they can use something like (states-with-deps) that would give them the current state of the application”:

dev=> (states-with-deps)
 
({:name app-config, :order 1, 
                    :started? true
                    :suspended? false
                    :ns #object[clojure.lang.Namespace 0x6e126efc "app.config"], 
                    :deps ()} 
 
 {:name conn, :order 2, 
              :started? true
              :suspended? false
              :ns #object[clojure.lang.Namespace 0xf1a66a6 "app.nyse"], 
              :deps ([app-config #'app.config/app-config])} 
 
 {:name nrepl, :order 3, 
               :started? true
               :suspended? false
               :ns #object[clojure.lang.Namespace 0x2c134117 "app"], 
               :deps ([app-config #'app.config/app-config])})

“That’s not bad, but what if they start/stop states selectively, or they suspended/resumed some states.. no visibility”

“Well, it’s simple, why not just return all the states that were affected by a lifecycle method?”

And that’s what I did. But I did not go through this thought process when I had logging in, since logging created an illusion of visibility and control, while in reality it gave “an ok” visibility and no control.

The solution just returns a vector of states that were affected:

dev=> (mount/start)
{:started [#'app.config/app-config 
           #'app.nyse/conn 
           #'app/nrepl
           #'check.suspend-resume-test/web-server
           #'check.suspend-resume-test/q-listener]}

The cool additional thing, and the reason it is a vector and not a set, is these states are in the vector in the order they were touched, in this case “started”.

While I made a mistake, I am glad I did. It gave me lots of food for thought as well as made me do some other cool tricks with robert hooke to demonstrate how to bring the same logging back if needed.

It does feel great to only depend on the Clojure itself, and a tiny tools.macro, which I use a single function from, and could potentially just grab from there, and cut my dependencies to The One.