Jank – The native Clojure dialect with seamless C++ interop

8 hours ago (jank-lang.org)

I think repl driven development with access to native code could be a magic formula for agent engineering. No restarting, no re-compiling. Plus with persistent, immutable data structures you can iterate with many threads in parallel while maintaining sanity.

  • Welcome to the previous AI Summer with Lisp and Prolog environments, :)

    Pity that the new Summer got to ride an interpreted language, with bindings to native libraries instead.

  • It is. I'm amazed at how quickly agents can work with my Clojure code base and try things out. They make great use of the REPL.

  • The first thing that comes to mind with no restarts or recompiling is the mangled variables you get in Jupiter if you're mucking around trying to get a prototype going and forget which cells have been run. I can definitely see agents having a problem with that. I would just try to make compilation fast if possible

    • Immutability and stateless separate the nrepl from jupyter. Clojure is not strictly functional but it tends to be the most straightforward way to do most tasks in the language.

    • People who are already using LLMs to drive Clojure REPLs say it works well (see #ai-driven-development on the Clojure Slack). I don't think forgetting which cells have been run is a problem with the described set up.