Yannick Scherer :clojureD 2017 Interview

Yannick Scherer will be giving a talk at :clojureD 2017. He will be speaking about Powerful Data Access in Clojure.

Follow him on GitHub and Twitter.

PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Clojure?

Yannick Scherer: When I was in school I had the option to join a CS class led by an impressive Bavarian teacher with a strong affinity for functional programming -- a common combination, I'm sure.

So, my first language was Scheme -- already functional, already a Lisp -- and seeing Clojure a few years later immediately filled me with a sense of familiarity. I tried it out within the hour and I've stuck with it ever since.

PF.tv: What is your talk about?

YS: When fetching data from remote data sources there is a lot that we don't want to care about, including things like batching similar requests, parallelising independent ones or ensuring consistency for repeated fetches.

My talk will shed light on these problems and how we end up with them, as well as discuss concrete solutions and novel ideas from within the FP community.

PF.tv: Who is your talk for?

YS: The talk is targeted at developers that need to interact with remote data sources (like databases or HTTP servers). The concepts presented are language-agnostic; we will, however, look at concrete Clojure libraries that implement them.

PF.tv: What do you hope people will take away from the talk?

YS: There are awesome tools in the Clojure ecosystem that let your data access look elegant and simple, while keeping it maintainable and efficient. I hope to make people want to try them out.

PF.tv: What concepts do you recommend people be familiar with to maximize their experience with the talk?

YS: The talk will start at a basic level and gradually add more complex concepts, so you should be able to follow it without a lot of preparation. However, checking out the ideas behind Haskell's [HAXL](https://github.com/faceb ook/Haxl) library might make some only briefly shown things more clear.

PF.tv: What resources are available for people who want to study up before the talk?

YS: The paper "There is no Fork" that introduced the abstractions used in HAXL is where it all begins. And GraphQL is where it gets great.

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

YS: I'm @xsc on Github and @xscys on Twitter.

PF.tv: Are there any projects you'd like people to be aware of?

YS: How can people help out? I've been working on claro claro for about a year now, a library that lets you streamline your data access using the same concepts I'll be presenting in the talk.

But, more importantly in my opinion, I've been pushing to implement a GraphQL engine on top of it, encapsulated within the alumbra alumbra project. Comments, suggestions, critique or code contributions would be very appreciated!

PF.tv: Where do you see the state of Clojure in 10 years?

YS: I'm convinced it won't be going anywhere, seeing as the ecosystem is very active and the value provided by the JVM are great selling points. ClojureScript, however, might become the more popular variant in the long run.

PF.tv: If Clojure were an animal, what animal would it be?

YS: Platypus.