clojure spec vs plumatic schema

Question

A colleague brought to my attention that Clojure Spec is still alpha and that Plumatic Schema might be a better way to do the same tipe of spec.

Do you folks have any advice?

Cheers!

Answer 1

Plumatic Schema was last updated about two years ago.

spec.alpha has been fairly continuously updated by the core team with a new release in February of this year.

I'm a bit biased: at work we were an early adopter of Spec and I wrote about how heavily we are using it https://corfield.org/blog/2019/09/13/using-spec/ (five years ago and all still true today).

If you're genuinely looking for a "competitor" to Spec, perhaps https://github.com/metosin/malli might suit you. I personally think it does too much and I prefer the core team's approach (Spec).

As for "alpha", we're currently running Clojure 1.12 Alpha 9 in production and have run Alpha (and Beta and RC) releases of Clojure in production since 2013 so Spec still being alpha isn't a concern for us...

Comments

Great to know, thanks Sean!

I've been told that the age of updates for repos in the Clojure world are less relevant than in other languages. Aside from that, a colleague from a large company that uses Clojure told me that they prefer Plumatic Schema for not being alpha.

I'm guessing that this might be related to some particular requirement like the size of the company, the domain (more/less mission critical), etc. I don't know.

But if it works for you, most certainly works for me (my company is waaay smaller than yours).

Thanks!!

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My company has two Clojure devs so I think you might be surprised about size -- even tho' we manage 145k lines of Clojure code.

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WOW, that's awesome! I've seen some of your videos on youtube, but don't remember hearing that part. You folks work with Clojure since the ColdFusion migration, right? Would like to hear that story! If there's a video you can point me to, would be great :).

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I did a series of talks at user groups around the world about our CFML to Clojure migration. Very early on in the migration, I did a short talk at Clojure/West, but I don't think any of the later (and much longer) talks were recorded. If you're on Slack, Zulip, or Discord, I'm always happy to talk about our migration (that started back in 2011).

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And I should also note that my comment about Schema not being updated for a couple of years wasn't specifically a negative, only a comparative: Spec has been updated and Malli is very, very actively maintained.