What can be a better start of 2019 than some freshly brewed CIDER’(0.)19? Consider the release of the latest CIDER my attempt to keep the New Year festivities going for a while longer. It’s also an attempt to clear some overdue items from my (humongous) personal todo list at the start of the new year (other overdue items I tackled today were shaving and taking a shower).

Anyways, the most important thing is that CIDER 0.19 (Raleigh) is here! Its codename is a tribute to the wonderful time I spent in Raleigh, NC with my buddy Jin around Clojure/conj (Raleigh is right next to Durham, where the conference took place). Raleigh is not a big city and it’s also not a big CIDER release - 0.19 is mostly polishing work for the much bigger 0.18. In particular we focused a lot on improving the new connection management subsystem. We’ve also introduced the concept of friendly sessions, which should solve the commonly reported problem that moving from a project to the source of some of its dependencies, and trying to evaluate code there, would result in an error saying that there are no CIDER sessions associated with the currently visited file.

All the problems that were reported around the new connection/session management reminded me once again how hard it is for a tool writer to guess how people are actually using their tool. For instance - I never edit the code of dependencies inline, so I completely ignored this use-case while we were revamping the connection management with Vitalie. It was quite enlightening for me to discuss with our users their workflows over the past couple of months and how we can make things better for them. That also reminded me for the millionth time that I should probably document somewhere the “intended” workflow, so at least people would know how certain features were envisioned to be used.

One more thing about CIDER 0.19 - it fixes an annoying problem, related to the changed format of the error messages in Clojure 1.10.

You can see the complete list of changes in CIDER 0.19 here. Thanks to all the amazing contributors who worked on this release! You rock and I love you!

What’s next for CIDER in 2019? Short-term the focus is going to be more fixes and more polish, and afterwards we’ll see. Now that the latest Leiningen (2.8.3) bundles the modern nREPL, CIDER is going to drop support for tools.nrepl and implement all the cool new features provided by recent nREPLs (e.g. native pretty-printing). Everyone will do well to upgrade to Leiningen 2.8.3 as soon as possible to avoid unexpected errors with CIDER 0.20.

As usual, people can refer to CIDER’s roadmap if they are curious about the high-level plans for the future or they are looking for ideas as to how to contribute to the project. One thing that has been on the back of my mind recently is that we should also start evaluating the current set of features and customization settings and start removing stuff that’s rarely used for the sake of having a more compact and easier to maintain codebase. Today the Emacs Lisp code is around 14,000 line which is not that much, but still - in programming less is usually more.

While on the subject of contributing to the project - a few people asked me at Clojure/conj and ClojureX how they can donate money to CIDER - all the donation channels are documented here, with OpenCollective currently being the preferred channel. As usual the year begins with the dream that we’re going to get enough funding from users and sponsors to be able to allocate more time to the project, pay bounties for certain important features to be developed and so on. So far donations haven’t worked out well for CIDER, but at least their annual amount has been gradually climbing (it reached almost $5000 this year). Perhaps we should revise our strategy on this front, as doing the same things and expecting different results supposedly doesn’t speak very well for one’s character…

Some people suggested recently that CIDER should start charging commercial users, as most companies would never really donate money, but would be perfectly fine to pay an annual license of $50-60. I’ll try to explore this avenue further, although I’m definitely not certain about the best way to approach this. Probably it’s as easy as what Cognitect did for REBL (adding some text to the license that commercial users should pay something like $5/month via OpenCollective), but I’ll have to find some time to research this further. If someone has ideas/experience in this area I’d love to hear them! I’d also appreciate it if you shared in the comments whether you think that’s a reasonable idea in general.

That’s all from me for now. Enjoy the new CIDER (ir)responsibly and have a wonderful new year full of parentheses, sweet REPLs, love and happiness!