Home - mars0i/research-clojure GitHub Wiki

tl;dr: This wiki collects links and info on scientific, creative, and academic uses of Clojure, including science, digital humanities, art, music, etc. Having a central location for such information will help those of us interested in such work, and might help promote the use of Clojure in applications that are not purely business-oriented. (In the end, this will help the business end of the Clojure community, too.)

Contributions welcome!

Rationale: Clojure has a vibrant and supportive community, with helpful people and many good libraries. However, as far as I can tell, Clojure's popularity comes primarily from segments of the business community. Clojure is apparently less popular among scientists (whether in academia or in the private sector). I suspect that Clojure is also relatively unpopular among non-science researchers and creative folks, such as those working in digital humanities or computer-generated art, but there's not much of that anyway, so it's hard to say. It's not that there is no interest in using Clojure in these areas. Recent Clojure conferences have featured talks on scientific and artistic uses of Clojure. Still, if you follow discussions in the Clojure Google groups and on Slack, there's very little hint of scientific or creative applications, and the Clojure success stories page focuses pretty much exclusively on business uses. Clojure's statistical package Incanter is great, and I'm grateful to the people who've worked on it, but it has needed additional work for a while, and there's apparently not enough of a community of users to make this happen. Similarly, there's a interface to Mathematica, but it's old and there are broken links on its web pages, again suggesting a lack of interest by Clojure users. Note too, that while F# and Ocaml have interfaces to the R statistical package that allow direct calls to R and use of R data from within the language, Clojure only has Rincanter, an old wrapper to a JNI interface to R that requires passing R commands as strings--again suggesting a lack of interest in statistical applications in Clojure. (On the other hand, parts of machine learning overlap with statistics, and there's current, ongoing work on machine learning tools in Clojure.)

What's not included? Well, you know--online stores, inventory management systems, etc.--as well as general-purpose tools. I'm also excluding games that aren't intimately connected to one of the other areas included in this wiki. All of that stuff is important! We need it. I used to build some of it, in fact. It just isn't the focus of this wiki.

Is the focus too broad for a single wiki? For example, why not split it into science and humanities wikis? Well, as a philosopher of science who does research that's simultaneously scientific and philosophical, I just wouldn't know where to draw the line. And as someone who wants to foster the use of insights from the humanities in some parts of science, and to promote the utility of science for some parts of the humanities, I wouldn't want to draw such a line. There's no interesting line between scientific research in academia and other sectors, either. Nor does it make sense to draw an arbitrary line between art by people with academic appointments and those who don't have them; that's just silly.

If you want, you can think of this wiki as guided by a loose family resemblance or prototype concept.