Prototyping in Clojure by Philip Potter.
From the post:
We recently completed an alpha on identity assurance for organisations. The objective of an alpha is to gain understanding of a service and validate a design approach by building a working prototype. As part of the alpha, we built a set of interacting prototype applications representing a number of separate services as assurers and consumers of identity information. Because our objective was understanding and validation, these prototypes did not use any real user’s data.
We wanted our prototype to:
- evolve rapidly, adapt quickly to feedback from our user research, and to be able to change direction entirely if necessary
- be realistic enough to validate whether the service we were exploring was technically feasible
- be simple and focus on the service we were trying to explore, rather than getting bogged down in implementation details
However, we didn’t need to worry about maintaining the code long-term: because the objective was better understanding through building a prototype, we were prepared to throw the code away at the end.
A government alpha IT project? That alone makes the post worth mentioning. Someday FRPs for alphas may be a feature of the United States Government 2.0. 😉
Philip covers the pluses, minuses and could be better aspects of using Clojure for prototyping. Particularly useful if you want to use or improve Clojure as a prototyping language.
Curious, even if prototype code is “thrown away,” does the clarity of understanding from functional coding have a measurable impact on the final code?
I doubt there is enough Clojure prototyping to form a basis for such a study now, but in a few years…, it could be a hot topic of research interest.
I first saw this in a tweet by P.F.