Discover the future of software from the people making it happen.Listen to some of the smartest developers we know talk about what they're working on, how they're trying to move the industry forward, and what you can learn from it. You might find the solution to your next architectural headache, pick up a new programming language, or just hear some good war stories from the frontline of technology.Join your host Kris Jenkins as we try to figure out what tomorrow's computing will look like the best way we know how - by listening directly to the developers' voices.
Why Lisp Thrives In The Age Of AI (with Cameron Barré)
Earlier this year it looked like AI might kill programming language innovation. Coding agents were at their best in the mainstream languages with decades of training data, which made the barrier to adopting anything new higher than ever. That's changed. With the right skills files, an agent will write Haskell or Gleam as happily as Java, and that flips the situation on its head: it's never been cheaper to take a new language, or a new architecture, out for a test drive. All we need is ideas worth trying.
So this week I'm joined by an enthusiastic proponent of a language, an architecture and a library you might want to try. Cameron Barré is a long-time Clojure programmer and the author of Grain, an open-source library for building event-sourced information systems. We start with what makes a system simple or complex, and the difference between essential and accidental complexity. Then we look at why Cameron thinks Lisp is an excellent choice for expressing both code and constraints, and why a live REPL might matter even more to an agent than it does to a human. From there we get into event modeling, an architecture so simple to understand that even a clanker can get it right, and how Grain uses Clojure macros to turn a handful of primitives (commands, events, views and todo processors) into a DSL that stops agents drifting from the architecture.
If you've been looking for an excuse to revisit Lisp or event sourcing, or you're wondering what a language should give us now that agents write most of the code, this is a tour of a different way of thinking: power where you need it, constraints where you don't, and cheap enough to try for yourself.
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Grain: https://github.com/ObneyAI/grain
Cameron's Clojure/Conj 2026 Talk - Building Simple Systems in the World of Natural Language Programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKFxDDtfJVI
Obney.ai: https://obney.ai/
Event Modeling: https://eventmodeling.org/
Allium: https://juxt.github.io/allium/
What's Worth Knowing In AI Right Now? (with Henry Garner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43lsrgkhJ8c
Clojure: https://clojure.org/
Out of the Tar Pit (paper): https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf
Rich Hickey Fanclub: https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub
Design, Composition and Performance (Rich Hickey): https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance/
Calva: https://calva.io/
Datomic: https://www.datomic.com/
Nubank: https://nubank.com.br/
ClojureScript: https://clojurescript.org/
ClojureDart: https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart
Babashka: https://babashka.org/
Jank: https://jank-lang.org/
Jolt: https://jolt-lang.net/
Glojure: https://github.com/glojurelang/glojure
Clojure Test Suite: https://github.com/jank-lang/clojure-test-suite
Polylith: https://github.com/polyfy/polylith
Datastar: https://data-star.dev/
htmx: https://htmx.org/
Playwright: https://playwright.dev/
Code as Agent Harness (paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18747
Recursive Language Models (paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24601
EuroClojure 2027: https://2027.euroclojure.org/
Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social
Kris on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/