By Daniel Compton

Clojurists Together is happy to announce that for Q3 of 2019 (August-November) we are funding four projects:

Shadow CLJS with Thomas Heller

Meander with Joel Holdbrooks

Calva with Peter Strömberg

CIDER with Bozhidar Batsov

Recap

For those who are new to Clojurists Together, our goal is simple: Fund critical Clojure open-source projects to keep them healthy and sustainable. Clojure companies and individual developers sign up for a monthly contribution, and we pick projects to fund each quarter. Previously we have supported datascript, kaocha, cljdoc, Shadow CLJS, clj-http, Figwheel, ClojureScript, CIDER, Aleph, Neanderthal, and Fireplace.

Funding details

We support our grantees by paying them a total of $9,000 over three months ($3,000/mo).

Shadow CLJS

Why is Shadow CLJS important?

Shadow-cljs is a fully featured CLJS build tool with seamless integration into the npm ecosystem.

Thomas’ plans for the next three months are:

Finalize and properly document react-native/expo support. More detailed documentation for all build targets with proper up-to-date examples, including proper deployment examples using common platforms.

Meander

Why is Meander important?

Meander provides a uniquely transparent way of performing data manipulation that aims to be declarative, performant, and safe. These properties are important because they enable Clojure developers to write correct data manipulation code using a common language which encourages collaboration and thoughtful design without sacrificing dynamism. And because Meander has been designed with both transparency and accuracy in mind, Clojure code written with it can be an asset to a development team and, thus, a business.

Joel’s plans for the next three months are:

I plan to invest heavily in my next version of the library: epsilon. My primary goals for this funding would be to improve the performance of the code emitted by the pattern matching and substitution compilers, begin working on a compiler specifically for rewriting (matching + substitution), and greatly improving the documentation.

Calva

Why is Calva important?

VS Code is the editor of choice for many developers and having good Clojure and ClojureScript support on the platform helps newcomers find the joy of Clojure faster. VS Code also is easier to use than many other development environments, and by leveraging this, Calva can make Clojure more accessible generally.

Peter’s plans for the next three months are:

With the latest major release of Calva it was made easier to use and also much easier to start with, for people not familiar with the tooling dependencies in Clojure and ClojureScript development.

But it is clear from the questions people pose and the help they require that there is still work to do to make it easier and less confusing to start with Clojure using Calva.

My time with Calva during funding will be spent on the following tasks:

Easier Clojure and ClojureScript on-boarding, mainly through documentation and video material, but also by ironing out some rough edges in Calva.

Support for inspecting and using local variables during interactive development.

Basic refactoring support.

Scratching some of the pet itches users experience, like: interrupting long running processes, displaying function argument lists during typing code, repl prompt improvements.

I’d also like to find some time to:

Improve the shadow-cljs support, which needs some special attention.

Improve the help with examining large result data structures.

CIDER

Why is CIDER important?

CIDER is a very popular programming environment and its infrastructure (nREPL, cider-nrepl, piggieback and orchard) powers many of the other tools out there (e.g. vim-fireplace, vim-iced, calva, etc). Improvements to CIDER and its foundational pieces generally benefits most of the Clojure community.

Bozhidar’s plans for the next three months are:

Improve the projects home page and documentation portal with a focus on improved onboarding for newcomers

Add cider-nrepl documentation to the documentation portal

Improve the nREPL docs portal (e.g. add search, more info or writing extensions, etc)

Add support for client-side dep injection to nREPL

Clean up the APIs of orchard and cider-nrepl and make them more uniform

Improve the api docs for orchard and cider-nrepl

Make the indentation in clojure-mode a bit more flexible (e.g. support using ; )

) Various small cleanups and improvements to CIDER in preparation for a 1.0 release (e.g. making it easier to specify a custom form to start a ClojureScript REPL, make the shortcuts in the debugger customizable, inject ClojureScript deps in jack-in, etc)

Learn more about ClojureScript, so I can improve the support for it :-)

2-3 monthly instalments in the “Hard CIDER” blog series

An “Intro to CIDER” screencast

Voting details

The projects that applied this quarter were:

Clojure’s Boring Web Framework

Practicalli Spacemacs

vim-iced

CIDER

Chlorine

Meander

Typed Clojure

Calva

datahike

cloxp 2.0

perun

Fulcro

Formic

Intro to Programming w/Clojure in Georgian Language

Pathom

Origami

Klipse

Fireplace

LightTable

Shadow CLJS

ohmyclj

Q3 2019 Funding

We had a bunch of great applications from great projects. If you’d like to see more projects get funded, then please join. If you applied for the last funding cycle, we will re-use that application for future funding cycles. If you maintain a Clojure/ClojureScript project that is important to the community, consider applying for funding so we can help you keep it sustainable.

Lastly, a big thank you to all of our members. We couldn’t have done it without your support.