Software Engineering at Prismatic

"While we make heavy use of the core of Clojure, we don't use its concurrency primitives (atoms, refs, STM, etc.) because a function like pmap doesn't have enough fine grained control for our needs. We opt instead to build our own concurrency abstractions in Clojure on top of the outstanding java.util.concurrent package."<p>I wrote a web crawler in clojure at at&#38;t and our team came to this same conclusion. First we tried to implement a custom atom, but finally using java.util.concurrent directly.<p>I'm not sure what this says about the clojure concurrency features, but I've found myself using them sparingly even when doing a lot of concurrency.

"We tend to build our own libraries simply because much of the functionality of open-source code is locked up into monolithic frameworks and not easily re-usable."<p>Wow, I couldn't agree more with this concept of library vs. framework. While frameworks provide all kinds of up-front time savings, I've never used one that didn't end up getting in my way and require all kinds of deeply placed hacks to work how I (or my company/client) wanted.<p>I sometimes feel out of the loop because I'm not using all of the popular frameworks everyone else is talking about at the moment. So it's refreshing to hear I'm not alone in the opinion that time is saved in the long run by writing one's own small, modular, easily understood and reused libraries if none are already available.<p>I do feel as though small, self-contained code bases are becoming easier to find with the rise in popularity of sites such as GitHub and Bitbucket. So perhaps the trend towards less monolithic software can become more mainstream.

I'm most interested to know about the Flop library. This has always seemed a weak point of the JVM ecosystem. While there are many numeric libraries none seems dominant and speed suffers next to BLAS. Of course programming and using such a library in Java is also painful. This is a domain where functions really are by definition the right abstraction!

The CEO, bradfordcross, is amazing at distilling good engineering to principles. Software engineering for hackers.

Very much looking forward to the rest of the posts, and the release of these projects :)

where's the rss feed to subscribe to?

nerd crushing so hard this team and their work.

Great post. Very thought-provoking.