[dmichulke]

Eventually you want non-developers to develop business rules, so you come up with pseude-code like

  when X then do Y

You can write them in Clojure like in the above example:

  [:rule [:when X] [:then Y]] 

which is kind of self-explanatory. X and Y can be any valid predefined expressions, e.g.

  [:rule [:when [:< amount 100]] [:then [:send-email-to-boss]]]

If you had such a rule, you'd just parse that line as edn, substitute all symbols (check for injection attacks) and execute it.

However, effectively clojure itself is most often the smallest representation:

  (when (< amount 100) (send-email-to-boss))

It's just not that readable because it's missing the "then", but it would be valid clojure right away.

In the end it's like a code snippet that non-developers can write without having to set up a compiler, run-time, syntax-checker

[vincnetas]

from my experience im very sceptical each time when someone says that business people will write these rules. on paper it looks nice but at the end if rule is a bit more complicated developers end up writing or updating the rule while someone standing behind their back :)

[vamega]

I’ve seen business people write rules in excel. A. lightweight dsl with a quick feedback loop (provided by a REPL in Clojure, and the UI of excel) seems to be key features to avoid ending up in the scenario you describe