[hlship]

I've been using Clerk quite a bit lately and found it quite useful. Although I'm normally in a REPL loop, having control over the output ends up being very useful, and the ability to paginate long results, or graph them, it's great.

I'm also using it for some Clojure mentoring/training, so providing my mentees with runnable, changeable examples to explore jumpstarts their understanding.

I wish I could share images easily here; one of my exercises is looking for a solution to a chess puzzle on a 4x4 board. The board state is a map, but with a little meta-data, Clerk will present it as a 4x4 chess board (that is, there's a function that renders the board map to HTML which is presented).

Under the covers, Clerk is doing a lot of work to analyze each code block in a notebook, to determine dependencies so that it can efficiently recalculate changes and control execution ordering.

[thom]

Ah so it’s not just rerunning too to bottom each time? It just works out changes and runs from there forward?

[hlship]

Yes, and it caches results on the file system, so results persist between executions AFAIK. That comes in handy for one of my notebooks that has to slurp up Splunk data for 20 minutes.

[thom]

Nice, yeah, I am not a fan of retraining models on my workstation in the UK’s current heatwave.