Clojurians Log v2

Agree that using certain Java from Clojure isn’t a great experience. Hate to admit it but I sometimes get ChatGPT to write me a quick Clojure abstraction on top of Java code. That might be an option for you too. Even for Java users they should very rarely be using inheritance or abstract classes (only to represent actual ironclad hierarchies not just for code reuse). They should nearly always be using interfaces rather than directly calling classes. An interface which only has one implementation is absolutely fine. Java and Clojure can use reflection to break into hidden/private fields/methods (so why bother making them private?!) but it’s best if the classes/interface just makes practically everything public by default (this is how Clojure namespaces work). They should also use the standard interfaces and types (eg Map, List, String, Double) as much as possible to increase compatibility and reduce endless conversions. Just like in Clojure things should be as immutable as possible - this means you are often retuning a new object not modifying the existing object in place. Yes this might feel like more boilerplate in Java but it’s worth it. Also it helps to avoid creating lots of classes that have to be each instantiated - as a Clojure user my heart sinks when I realize I need to instantiate 10 Java classes just so I can make a single method call.

@veckon As a refactoring pattern

take the abstract hierarchy and translate the public methods to a matching set of interfaces

have the abstract classes implement the interfaces

if you can now drop the abstract class from the public api do so

Thanks all! Great ideas.