Clojure's Live REPL Makes It the Ideal Language for the Age of LLMs
Clojure in the age of language models
In the age of generative models, imperative programming is becoming like assembly, while high-level reasoning about algorithms and data flows matters more. Clojure's data-centric, declarative style, homoiconic syntax, and live REPL collapse the compile-test loop, letting agents inspect and modify running state without restarts. Immutability and pure functions make isolated testing safe, and terse code fits better in context windows. Jolt addresses JVM friction by shipping a single binary with native interop.
At this point, I find anything with a compile cycle is a nonstarter if I have an option to have a live programming environment.
- slifin
I love Clojure's Flowstorm, it makes it easy to verify code is doing what you think — all the data is exposed programmatically so you can also create your own GUIS from it or feed it to LLMs so they can have a deep understanding of program behaviour (or you can browse it yourself)
- mrkeen
> A bigger problem is the tedious necessity of having to reconstruct the desired state every single run. When you have something small with limited functionality, that is fine, but as your application grows, rebuilding the state can take a significant effort.
This is what tests are for. There should be no buildup of internal state that can't be arrived at with a simple invocation in a unit test.
- dzonga
I haven't written Clojure in a while.
but I think clojure is well suited for the age of llm's. token efficient .everything is data even the code is data is easy to deal with verification. pure functions etc.
however one will still need to know how to write / read clojure. when the industry is trending towards not reading code e.g the shit dhh has been parroting lately about not reading code and likewise many people in the industry.