Clojure data science,
no setup required.

This is an experiment. Clojure has a lot of benefits when it comes to working with data, but it can be a bit daunting knowing where to start. Clojure's data science community, Scicloj, has put tremendous effort into making Clojure's data science toolkit easier to use and more approachable in recent years, and this is one more contribution toward that effort — a way to test how much of the barrier to adoption is really just the setup. If we can remove all of that friction by offering a truly zero-setup environment to play with, does getting started feel easier?

Here you'll get a fully functional, free notebook with Clojure's full data science stack loaded and running on a real JVM, backed by your very own Sprite.

For now, I am subsidizing this first phase of the experiment. It is free thanks to my generous GitHub Sponsors. If it goes well, I will find a way to make it sustainable by adding paid tiers, or something, but for now I am happy to fund this initial prototype phase to see if this is even useful. If you would like to see this continue, please try it out and let me know what you think. You can email me, or find me in the Clojurians Zulip or Slack. You can also contribute to the project financially by sponsoring me on GitHub.

This initial demo is limited to 40 users, each getting approximately 50 hours of notebook usage, with up to 10 users active at any one time. These limitations are in place to keep costs in check until I decide what to do with this project, if anything.

Your notebook and its files live on your own Sprite and persist between sessions — close the tab and everything is exactly where you left it, REPL state and all, when you come back. When you step away the sprite suspends itself so it stops using resources, and your next keystroke wakes it.

Because this is a free prototype with a limited number of machines available, notebooks that sit unused eventually get deleted. You'll get a warning email after 23 days of inactivity, and the notebook is deleted after 30. And since this is an experimental environment and notebooks are publicly shareable for now, please don't put anything sensitive in a notebook — no passwords, API keys, or private data. Anything you share with a read-only link becomes visible to anyone who has the link.

The full details are on the privacy & terms page.

I'm Kira Howe (formerly McLean). I gave a talk about Noj and Clojure's data science stack when it was mostly just a dream back at the conj in 2023. So much has happened since then, and I feel like one of the new biggest hurdles to overcome is making Clojure's ecosystem approachable and easy to use. This is one experiment in that direction.