This is a post about Datalevin, an open-source database system that I have been building since 2020. Although JOB here is really an acronym for Join Order Benchmark, a benchmark for complex database queries, I intend to build up Datalevin to compete for the same kind of jobs usually held …

Someone asked on Reddit: Why Clojure is not widely adopted like mainstream languages?

Here's my answer:

You probably should have flipped the question, because the vast majority of programming languages are not mainstream.

The more insightful question is: "Why and how did a language X become mainstream?"

From the answers …

Here is the story. I am adding full-text search capability to Datalevin, a Datalog database that we open sourced last year. For this task, I have decided to write a search engine from scratch instead of using an existing search library. Here are some rationales for this decision. Today I …

Someone asked on Reddit this question, for he's wondering if it is worth the time to learn Clojure well. He has dabbled in Clojure for half a year, but was not convinced of its benefits. He has not used REPL much, and was wondering if he was doing something wrong …

One of the latest fashions in the Java world is GraalVM. For someone who has been around, I still remember the "Write once, run anywhere" slogan of Java virtual machine. Apparently, the wheel has spun back, now people want to write native code in Java, which has to be compiled …

The main product of my startup is written in Clojure, a language that puts enormous pressure on the memory garbage collector due to the pervasive use of immutable data structures. The new Z garbage collector on JVM has been a blessing for us, as it has largely solved our memory …

JSON is arguably the world's most popular human readable data format today.  It has largely replaced XML as the data exchange format on the Internet. One of the key reasons for the proliferation of JSON is its simplicity.  The data structure are very limited: only arrays, enclosed with []; and objects …

Clojure has been my primary programming language for a couple of years now. During this period, I have relied on my trusty Vim text editor as the development environment. Coding Clojure in Vim had been an enjoyable experience with these excellent Vim plugins:

1. vim-clojure-static
2. fireplace.vim
3. paredit.vim
4. Rainbow Parentheses …

As previously mentioned, I am learning category theory, beginning with Lawvere's Conceptual Mathematics book. This is a very elementry book that assumes almost nothing as a background. However, it is still a math book, which requires doing some exercises. Since the book provides no answer to exercises, I decide …

Finally done with all the 100 problems listed on 4clojure.com so far :-). When new problems appears there, I will probably do them when I have some time to kill, but I will not post my solutions here any more. If I found interesting programming exercises, I may submit to …

This post continues the previous one, on my solutions for small clojure programming problems on 4clojure.com. Doing these problems seems to be addictive as I could not seem to stop myself. The site recently added a golf league feature, so one can see how short one's own solution compared …

For someone without previous Lisp experience, the hardest part of learning Clojure programming seems to be the functional way of doing things. It is like math, one really needs to do some exercises in order to master it. At this point, 4clojure.com seems to be the best place for …

I recently started to learn clojure programming. It is an interesting experience. Ever since I learned computer programming almost 20 years ago, in Pascal, on a VAX minicomputer terminal, I have not experienced this newbie sensation with a computer language. The sense of excitement and novelty is high, and the …