Clojure Freed Me from the Ceremony
The author reflects on their experience using Clojure at Nubank, highlighting the reduction in code complexity compared to traditional object-oriented programming. They appreciate how Clojure allows for simpler expressions of logic without the extensive scaffolding required by languages like C# and Java. While acknowledging the merits of OOP, the author finds that Clojure's functional programming approach aligns better with backend data transformation tasks.
- ▪Clojure reduces the amount of code needed to achieve the same functionality compared to C# or Java.
- ▪The author notes that much of the complexity in OOP comes from the language's requirements for structure and scaffolding.
- ▪Clojure's design encourages simplicity, allowing developers to focus on core logic rather than boilerplate code.
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Record
| Original publisher | Software Theory |
| Canonical URL | https://carlosblanco.github.io/clojure/functional-programming/2020/10/15/functional-programming-clojure-backend-simplicity.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 15:54:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T16:04:56.662Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T16:04:56.662Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hrDhvzQPSUNZ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How Clojure Freed Me from the Ceremony Oct 15, 2020 • Carlos Blanco A year into working at Nubank — where the backend runs almost entirely on Clojure — I’ve had enough time to form a real opinion rather than a first impression. The thing that keeps standing out to me is how much less code I write to accomplish the same things I used to do in C# or Java. Not fewer features, not less correctness — fewer words. When I was watching Rich Hickey talk about how standard libraries in some OOP languages end up with deeply layered class hierarchies just to represent simple concepts, something clicked. The complexity isn’t always in the problem. A lot of the time it’s in the language’s way of expressing the solution.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Software Theory.
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