PERMALINK

The Clojure Standard Library

Clojure’s standard library (aka the Core Library) is well thought-of and a pleasure to use.

But it’s pretty massive with around 700 functions and macros provided¹, some of them having several (potentially tricky) use-cases and ways to combine them.

Moreover their documentation tend to be very concise, working more like little refreshers.

A step up is to use ClojureDocs and its user-provided examples.

A proper reference

I stumbled upon Clojure, The Essential Reference², a book that aims at being a proper reference to the Core Library, with exhaustive descriptions and examples.

It has become my go-to reference for getting the specificities of core functions and macros.

Jump to documentation from within Emacs

Emacs and CIDER provide convenience commands to jump to the documentation of a symbol:

• cider-doc: Show the docstring of the symbol (+ related symbols)
• cider-clojuredocs and cider-clojuredocs-web: Same but use ClojureDocs as a source,

I quickly wanted to have a similar capability with Clojure, The Essential Reference, thus I started writing a package.

Sadly I didn’t find any programmatic symbol index I could parse. So I decided to make one with semi-automated parsing of the book’s Table of Content.

Introducing new package: clojure-essential-ref.

I you find anything missing, don’t hesitate to suggest corrections with tickets or PRs.

Notes