Clojure 1.7 is around the corner, we’re already at version 1.7.0-alpha3. Fortunately, the iterative approach of clojure taken since 1.3 means that upgrading from one version to the next usually only needs a change in your project.clj file (as well as working interop accross versions, which is always nice).

There are some neat changes in 1.7, the most notable being the addition of transducers. I recommend reading through the introduction to transducers at http://blog.cognitect.com/blog/2014/8/6/transducers-are-coming and the video from strange loop at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbuzafcII.

A much smaller addition to 1.7 is the introduction of the update function in clojure.core . update is directly equivalent to update-in but operates on a single key.

When you wrote:

( -> input-map ( update-in [ :my-counter-key ] inc ))

You will now be able to write:

( -> input-map ( update :my-counter-key inc ))

This has been a long-wanted change and brings update on par with get , and assoc which have their -in suffixed equivalents.

One direct consequence of the change is that if you have a namespace that exposes an update function, you will need to deal with the fact that it will now clash with clojure.core/update since clojure.core is referred by default in all namespaces.

You have two strategies to deal with that fact:

Rename the function (which can be a bit intrusive)

Prevent clojure.core/update from being referred in your namespace

For the second strategy, you will only need to use the following form in your namespace declaration:

( ns my.namespace ( :require [ ... ]) ( :refer-clojure :exclude [ update ]))

If you don’t, your library consumers will have to deal with messages such as: