A major U.S. city's zoning update needed maps and analyses beyond what worked well for conventional geospatial tools. The domain-specific language in this talk grew from that need: citywide regulatory analyses over many spatial operations spread across thousands of geospatial parcels, running on the JVM and in the browser from one codebase. Underneath sit small Clojure libraries that each port a familiar JVM idiom to the JS ecosystem: native interop described as data, deterministic resource disposal, and core.async.flow-style parallelism. The talk works the stack through the reimplementations, showing which Clojure feature does the work at each layer and where the abstractions have salient differences.

Will Cohen

Will Cohen is an urban planner on the Zoning Reform team at the City of Boston's Planning Department, where he works on the city's zoning code, including legalizing accessory dwelling units. He has used Clojure since 2016.