This is a post in the Beyond Clojure blog series, in which a Clojure developer looks at typed languages for web app development. This is by no means a complete survey of the Haskell web development landscape, rather a random collection of thoughts.

If you are interested in typed functional languages one stands taller than the rest. It’s impossible not to get sucked into the Haskell vortex, but why fight it? In spite of its reputation of being extremely hard to learn and even harder to master, there are several excellent resources out there and you are guaranteed to learn lots of very valuable lessons.

Here we are, after five years of learning and later doing Clojure full time, I’ve come to the point where I am seriously looking around for alternatives. I’ve gotten very comfortable working in Clojure, and it has and will continue to serve me very well. But getting comfortable has a flip-side, you stop caring.

I recently tried to use Datomic in anger in a project. Here are some things I learned.

By reading the title of this post, you might think this entry is about using some clever Emacs skills to find bugs in old software. But no, it’s actually about hunting down bugs in Emacs itself (which incidentally happens to be very old software).

I’ve been quite vocal about my opinions on development environments and automating the creation of them on this blog and elsewhere. Boiling it down to the two points I feel most strongly about:

1. Always develop in a production-like environment
2. Automate the creation of these environments

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve stopped using Cider for Clojure development in Emacs. I find a simple ‘inferior lisp’ setup faster and more reliable. For a good summary of why one would consider not using Cider, see Luke VanderHart’s excellent summary.

Recently, I gave a talk at the Clojure eXchange 2014 titled ‘Developing Clojure in the Cloud’. I described a way of creating and using (Clojure) development environments inside VMs. I’ve been developing like this for the last year (spanning 2 projects).

Tradition demands that I write down some subjective thoughts on how my old friend F# is doing. So here we go again (for the 4th year running).

All I can really say is this: wow, what a year.