Creating DSLs A tale of spec tacular success and failure
summary
Spec-tacular is a DSL sitting between Clojure and Datomic that turns map specs into Datomic schemas, gives runtime and static verification, and supplies concise create/update/query forms; it runs in production (v0.6.0) but enforces strict entity typing that omits a generic any/ref and breaks Datomic idioms. Query and transact are macros that hide transaction data, namespaces collide rather than isolate, and base types and macro syntax are not extensible. It implements three update modes (by-reference/link, by-value, component) which mostly work but struggle with tree merges and advanced migrations.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 0:17Once upon a time...
- 17:02modularity
- 17:14composability
- 19:22immutability
- 24:11extensibility
- 27:19incremental abstraction
- 31:33illogical data doesn't reach the database
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