I wrote this as the final pieces of Ooloi's backend architecture were falling into place. What began as a meditation on infrastructure and isolation turned into something more personal about mastery, loss, and the strange kind of solitude that comes with finishing something no one else can see. This isn't documentation. It's a reflection. / Peter There's a peculiar melancholy that settles over you when you near the completion of something genuinely complex, something that has consumed many months of concentrated thought and represents the synthesis of decades of accumulated understanding. I find myself in precisely this position with Ooloi's backend architecture, and the psychological reality proves a bit more complicated than I'd anticipated. It's rather like the post-coital moment after particularly intense sex: that strange combination of satisfaction, exhaustion, and existential emptiness when the driving urgency suddenly lifts. You've achieved something profound, yet find yourself staring at the aftermath wondering what, precisely, comes next. I'm smoking a conceptual cigarette, as it were, contemplating the peculiar loneliness that follows architectural completion. In a matter of days, I'll complete the final piece: the endpoint resolution system for slurs and ties that uses the framework I've spent months building. Once that's finished, the backend will be conceptually complete – 15,000+ tests passing, STM transactions handling 100,000+ operations per second, Vector Path Descriptors enabling elegant client-server communication, and a transducer-based piece-walker that coordinates musical time with mathematical precision. The piece-walker literally performs the musical score, traversing it in time just as I once performed Vierne at the organ. To anyone versed in these technical domains, that represents serious work. To everyone else, it's incomprehensible gobbledygook happening 'under the hood' of something they might one day use to write music. And therein lies the first layer of loneliness: having solved genuinely difficult problems that almost nobody can fully appreciate. The Weight of Invisible Architecture Software architecture, when done properly, is invisible to its eventual users. They should never know about the STM transaction coordination that keeps their concurrent edits from colliding, or the VPD system that allows them to reference musical elements without direct object pointers, or the careful functional design that ensures their work remains consistent across complex operations. This invisibility is precisely the point – and precisely the problem. I've spent months solving challenges that required rather more thought than I'd initially anticipated, creating abstractions that handle the full complexity of musical notation whilst remaining elegant enough to extend indefinitely. Yet once complete, this work vanishes into infrastructure. The better I've done my job, the less visible it becomes. There's something profoundly isolating about completing work that embodies your best thinking but can never be fully shared. The musicians who will eventually use Ooloi might appreciate its responsiveness or reliability, but they'll never see the polymorphic dispatch system that makes complex musical operations feel effortless, or understand why the pure tree structure with ID references elegantly solves problems that have plagued notation software for decades. Clojure for ClosureThe choice of Clojure wasn't merely technical: it was also psychological. Having started programming in Lisp in 1976, having built Common Lisp compilers and interpreters, having spent $7.5 million of investor money and then having unresolved feelings about Igor Engraver's death for a quarter of a century, returning to a Lisp dialect feels like completing a circle that's been open far too long. Clojure for closure, if you will. But this completion reveals its own complexity. I'm 64, carrying more than five decades of programming experience and a parallel career as an internationally performed composer – an intersection that doesn't exactly suffer from overcrowding. The same mind that wrote what apparently is the internationally most played Swedish opera now architects STM concurrency patterns. The same hands that have performed French romantic organ works now implement temporal traversal through transducers. This convergence of domains should feel like triumph. Instead, it often feels like exile – not belonging entirely to the musical world I've moved beyond, nor quite fitting into the tech world that didn't shape me. I don't belong anywhere, really. The isolation isn't just professional; it's existential. The Economics of Art and Pragmatism I must confess something that still sits uneasily: I've essentially given up composing, despite international success, because conditions in Sweden for composers have deteriorated to the point where I had to prioritise my pension. There's an unwritten opera I'd like to complete – I have the text ready – but it will likely never come to fruition. Whether this represents economic necessity or conscious rejection of a cultural environment I found increasingly superficial and performative, I honestly can't say. Perhaps both. The exact proportion remains unclear even to myself, and I've learned to be comfortable with that ambiguity. Life rarely offers the clean motivations we prefer in retrospect. What I can say is this: the creative energy that might have gone into that final opera has found other expression. The same understanding of temporal flow, structural relationship, and expressive possibility that shaped my musical work now manifests in software architecture. It's sublimation in the deepest sense: not compromise, but transformation. The Paradox of CompletionHere's what nobody tells you about completing something genuinely substantial: the moment of architectural completion isn't triumph, it's vertigo. All those months of wrestling with complex problems, of holding intricate systems in your head, of solving puzzles that demanded your full intellectual capacity – suddenly that pressure lifts, and you're left staring at what you've built with a strange mixture of satisfaction and emptiness. The backend is nearly finished. The hard problems are solved. The foundation is solid. And now comes the work that should be 'easier': creating user interfaces, handling the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of human interaction, making decisions about visual design and workflow that seem trivial after months of STM transaction coordination but are actually far more treacherous. Technical problems have logical solutions. Human interface problems have cultural solutions, psychological solutions, aesthetic solutions; domains where being right isn't enough, where the same mind that can architect transducer pipelines struggles with questions like 'should this button be blue or green?' not because the technical challenge is greater, but because the criteria for success shift from mathematical to cultural. The Transition ChallengeMoving from backend completion to frontend implementation isn't just a technical transition. It's a psychological one. After months of building infrastructure that only I can see, I must now create experiences that others will judge. After solving problems where elegance and correctness align, I must now solve problems where user perception and technical reality often diverge. The loneliness of architectural completion isn't just about having done complex work in isolation. It's something else entirely. The 'easy' work ahead may be harder in ways that have nothing to do with computational complexity. It's about moving from mathematical elegance to human messiness, from logical purity to cultural compromise. Most acutely, it's about the strange position of being someone who carries irreplaceable knowledge – the synthesis of decades in both musical and computational domains – and wondering how to encode that understanding into forms that others can inherit and extend. Not just the technical patterns, but the aesthetic judgements, the performance intuitions, the hard-won understanding of how creative work actually happens. What Comes NextIn a couple of weeks, when the final endpoint resolution system is working and the backend architecture is truly complete, I'll begin the gRPC implementation that bridges backend and frontend. Then comes the 'Hello World' window – Ooloi's first visible manifestation, however simple.
The psychological challenge isn't technical uncertainty. I've built user interfaces before, in a previous technological era. It's the weight of transition: from solving invisible problems to creating visible experiences, from mathematical elegance to cultural navigation, from the loneliness of architectural completion to the different loneliness of human interface design. The work continues, but its nature changes completely. After months of building the engine, it's time to build the car. And to discover what new forms of isolation await when mathematical precision meets human perception. For now, I sit with the strange melancholy of nearly completing something that matters enormously but whose full significance can be communicated to virtually no one. It's a peculiar form of creative isolation – not the romantic loneliness of the misunderstood artist, but the technical loneliness of someone who happens to carry knowledge that exists at intersections most people never visit. Clojure for closure, indeed. But it turns out that closure reveals as much as it resolves. Time for a smoke.
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How solving a real music notation problem revealed the perfect transducer use case The Problem That Started It All I found myself confronting what appeared to be a deceptively simple requirement for Ooloi: 'Resolve slur endpoints across the musical structure'. Rather straightforward, one might assume: simply traverse the musical structure and locate where slurs terminate. But then, as so often is the case, the requirements revealed added complexity:
It became apparent that I needed a general-purpose piece traversal utility: something handling temporal coordination whilst remaining flexible enough for multiple applications. Rather than construct something bespoke (and likely regrettable), I researched the available approaches within Clojure's ecosystem. That's when I recognised this as precisely what transducers were designed for. The Architecture RecognitionAllow me to demonstrate the pattern I anticipated avoiding. Without a general traversal utility, each application would require its own approach: Three functions, identical traversal logic, different transformations. Exactly the architectural smell I wanted to avoid from the outset. This was precisely Rich Hickey's transducer insight made manifest: "What if the transformation was separate from the collection?" The Transducer RevelationWhat if I could write the temporal traversal once, then apply different transformations to it? Objective achieved: one traversal algorithm, many applications. But its architectural reach turned out to be even more profound. The Architectural InsightThe design decision hinged upon recognising that I was conflating two distinct concerns: the mechanism of traversal and the logic of transformation. This wasn't merely about avoiding the tedium of duplicated code (though that would have been reason enough) but rather about establishing clean architectural boundaries that would serve the system's long-term evolution. Consider the conceptual shift this separation enabled: Rather than thinking in terms of specific operations upon musical structures:
The transducer approach encouraged thinking in terms of composed processes:
The traversal thus became reusable infrastructure, whilst the transformation became pluggable logic. This distinction would prove invaluable as the system's requirements expanded. The Broader ApplicationsWhat I hadn't anticipated was how broadly applicable the resulting abstraction would prove. After implementing the piece-walker for attachment resolution, I discovered it elegantly supported patterns I hadn't originally considered, each demonstrating the composability that emerges naturally from separating traversal concerns: Each is built from simple, testable pieces. And they all inherit the same temporal coordination guarantee. This composability emerged naturally from the transducer design: a pleasant architectural bonus. The Performance Characteristics As one would expect from a well-designed transducer, memory usage remained constant regardless of piece size: a particularly crucial consideration when dealing with the sort of orchestral scores that might contain hundreds of thousands of musical elements. Consider the alternative approach, which would create intermediate collections at each processing step: The transducer version processes one item at a time: Same result, constant memory usage. This exemplifies what Rich meant by 'performance without compromising composability'. Demystifying Transducers Transducers suffer from an unfortunate reputation for complexity, often relegated to 'advanced topics' when they needn't be. This is particularly galling given that they're fundamentally straightforward when you encounter the right use case, which the musical domain provides in abundance. Think of transducers as 'transformation pipelines' that work with any data source, much as one might design AWS data processing workflows that operate regardless of whether the data arrives from S3 buckets, database queries, or API streams: The pipeline stays the same. The data source changes. In Ooloi: Why This Matters Beyond MusicThe piece-walker solved a universal software problem: How does one avoid duplicating traversal logic whilst maintaining performance and composability? This pattern applies everywhere:
Transducers provide the infrastructure for "traverse once, transform many ways." The Bigger PictureBuilding the piece-walker demonstrated that transducers aren't an abstract functional programming concept. They're a practical design pattern for a specific architectural problem: separating the concerns of traversal from transformation. The musical domain made this separation particularly clear because the temporal coordination requirements are so explicit. When you need the same traversal logic applied with different transformations, transducers provide the elegant answer. This separation makes code:
What's Next?The piece-walker is documented thoroughly in our Architecture Decision Record for those wanting technical details. But the real value lies not in the musical specifics but in observing how transducers address genuine architectural challenges with apparent effortlessness. The next time you find yourself contemplating similar data processing logic across multiple contexts, you might ask: 'What if the transformation was separate from the collection?' You may well recognise your own perfectly suitable transducer use case. References and Further ReadingRich Hickey's Essential Talks
Official Documentation
Educational Resources
Advanced Topics
![]() I recently spotted a meme on LinkedIn featuring a brooding, aristocratic Dracula asking, "What is a monad but a monoid in the category of endofunctors?" – accompanied by no explanation whatsoever. I chuckled, as one does when recognising an in-joke, but then found myself pondering a rather uncomfortable question: Is this really how we want to present functional programming to the world? The Allure of the Arcane There's something undeniably satisfying about mastering difficult concepts. When I first grasped the elegant power of immutable data structures, higher-order functions, and composability, it felt like discovering a secret door in a familiar house – one that led to a vast, beautiful landscape I'd never known existed. That eureka moment is profound, even transformative. But here's the rub: why do we in the functional programming community so often present that door as if it requires an arcane ritual to unlock? Why do we seem to relish the impenetrability of our terminology? Let's be honest with ourselves. There's a whiff of intellectual snobbery in the air when functional programmers gather. We've all heard (or perhaps even made) the disparaging remarks about "Java drones" or "code monkeys churning out mutable state on corporate slave galleys". We swap stories about the moment we "finally understood monads" as if recounting our initiation into a secret society. We wear our hard-won knowledge as a badge of honour – and sometimes, if we're being truly honest, as a mark of superiority. The Hidden Cost of Exclusivity This exclusivity comes at a cost. Functional programming remains woefully underutilised in the industry at large, despite offering compelling solutions to many of the problems that plague software development. Concurrency, side effect management, robust testing, code reuse – these aren't niche concerns, they're central challenges in modern software engineering. Yet we've somehow managed to position our toolbox of solutions as if it's too rarified for everyday use. Consider the meme I mentioned. For the initiated, it's a humorous reference to a famously opaque definition. For everyone else, it's not just impenetrable – it actively signals that they don't belong in the conversation. It's a velvet rope strung across the entrance to a club they didn't even know they might want to join. I'm reminded of my journey from Common Lisp to Clojure. Both languages offer powerful functional paradigms, but Clojure has managed to achieve something remarkable: it has brought functional programming concepts to a significantly wider audience. It didn't accomplish this by watering down the functional paradigm, but by emphasising practicality alongside purity. By meeting developers where they are – on the JVM, with access to the libraries and tools they already know – Clojure created an on-ramp rather than a barrier. No Monads Required Here's something we don't acknowledge often enough: you don't actually need to understand monads to be a productive functional programmer. In fact, in languages like Clojure, you can write elegant, powerful functional code for years without ever encountering the term. The core principles of functional programming – immutability, pure functions, higher-order functions, composability – can be understood through practical examples without diving into category theory. This isn't to say that the deeper theory isn't valuable. Of course it is! The mathematical foundations of functional programming provide extraordinary insight and power. But they're not the entrance exam. They're advanced courses you can take once you're already enrolled. Yet somehow, we've allowed the most theoretically complex aspects of functional programming to become its public face. It's as if we're advertising a car based on its differential equations rather than where it can take you. The False Dichotomy There's an insidious implication lurking beneath this state of affairs: the notion that there are two classes of programmers – the enlightened few who grasp the elegant abstractions of functional programming, and the unwashed masses writing imperative code. This is, to put it bluntly, utter bollocks. The reality is far more nuanced. Most programmers exist on a spectrum of understanding and application of functional principles. Many Java developers make excellent use of streams and lambdas. JavaScript programmers increasingly embrace immutability and pure functions. Even in traditionally imperative contexts, functional patterns are gaining traction. These aren't "lesser" applications of functional programming – they're pragmatic adaptations that solve real problems. The senior developer who introduces Option types to avoid null pointer exceptions in a legacy Java codebase is applying functional thinking in a way that delivers immediate, tangible benefits. Should we really consider them less enlightened than someone who can recite the monad laws but has never shipped a product? Building Bridges, Not Walls If we truly believe in the benefits of functional programming – and I certainly do – then we should be building bridges to make these ideas more accessible, not walls to keep the uninitiated out. What might this look like in practice? For starters, we could focus our evangelical efforts on the practical benefits rather than the theoretical foundations. When I'm talking to a team about adopting Clojure or functional patterns, I don't open with category theory. I talk about dramatically reduced bug rates due to immutability. I show how composable functions lead to more reusable code. I demonstrate how side effect isolation makes testing simpler and more reliable. And to really wow them, I might describe how immutable data structures instantly solve the Undo/Redo problem for any application with a frontend. We could also acknowledge that functional programming isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. Encouraging teams to adopt functional patterns incrementally within their existing codebases can yield substantial benefits and build confidence for deeper adoption. The choice isn't between pure Haskell and imperative spaghetti code – there's a vast, productive middle ground. Most importantly, we need to shift our community culture away from exclusivity and toward inclusivity. This doesn't mean abandoning rigour or depth – it means recognising that everyone starts somewhere, and the journey from imperative to functional thinking is challenging enough without adding artificial barriers. The Clojure Case Study It's worth examining why Clojure has been relatively successful in attracting developers who might otherwise have been put off by functional programming's reputation for difficulty. Firstly, Clojure is pragmatic to its core. It embraces functional principles without dogmatism, allowing for controlled mutability when necessary. It prioritises solving real problems over theoretical purity. Secondly, it meets developers where they are. By running on the JVM (and later JavaScript engines), it allows gradual adoption and interoperability with existing systems. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the Clojure community has generally focused on what the language enables rather than how clever you need to be to use it. The emphasis has been on what you can build, not on arcane knowledge as a status marker. This approach hasn't compromised the language's functional credentials – Clojure remains thoroughly functional in its philosophy and implementation. But it has made those functional principles accessible to a much wider audience. A More Welcoming Future I'd like to see a functional programming community that celebrates bringing new people in rather than keeping them out. One that takes as much pride in making complex concepts accessible as it does in mastering them. Imagine if our response to someone struggling with functional concepts wasn't "Well, once you understand monads..." but rather "Here's how this approach solved a similar problem I had..." Imagine if we shared our enthusiasm not through insider references that exclude the uninitiated, but through concrete examples that demonstrate the real-world power of functional approaches. Imagine if we recognised that the true measure of our understanding isn't our ability to recite category theory, but our ability to apply these principles to build better software and help others do the same. As I continue to develop Ooloi, my open-source music notation project in Clojure, I'm constantly reminded of this tension. The functional paradigm allows me to build a system that's both powerful and elegant. The code is concise, composable, and expressive in ways that would be difficult to achieve with imperative approaches. But when I'm documenting the system or preparing it for open-source collaboration, I'm mindful of the need to make these concepts accessible. The goal isn't to water down the functional aspects – they're essential to the system's design. Rather, it's to provide on-ramps that allow developers to engage with these ideas gradually, to see their practical benefits before diving into the deeper theory. Conclusion Functional programming isn't a secret to be jealously guarded – it's a powerful set of tools that can dramatically improve how we build software. Its core insights deserve to be widely shared and applied. So the next time you're tempted to share that monad joke or category theory reference, ask yourself: Am I opening a door or closing one? Am I inviting others to share in something valuable, or am I simply signalling my own cleverness? We don't need gatekeepers in the functional programming community. We need guides. Guides who remember what it was like not to know, who can explain complex concepts in accessible terms, who take pride not in how exclusive their knowledge is but in how effectively they can share it. After all, what is a community but a group of people helping each other grow? ![]() One of the central design principles behind FrankenScore/Ooloi is modularity. There is a small core, written in Clojure, and then there are plugins which can be written in any JVM language such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, JRuby, Jython, etc. This architecture has far-reaching consequences for contributors. For instance, the open-source core can be contributed to and extended natively in Clojure – which expert Clojurians will appreciate. This way, contributors have full access to all aspects of the core engine. But if you instead want to contribute to Ooloi using its plugin architecture, you can use any JVM language and production methodology. The API you'll be using lets you focus entirely on the musical task to be accomplished. You don't even have to know about things like transactions, concurrency, or memory management. You can safely work with the powerful musical abstractions the API gives you and let the efficient engine handle the rest. And commercial entities will also appreciate that Ooloi's plugin mechanism supports paid, close-source plugins. And as there is no loss in efficiency or speed, much of the Ooloi functionality will be implemented using plugins, including advanced playback, MusicXML support, virtual instruments, tablature, jazz notation, and much more. Read more about it in the updated and extended Development Plan. Claude & Clojure![]() It's no secret that I use Generative AI, specifically Claude Sonnet, to assist with the Ooloi project. I use it for writing Clojure tests TDD fashion, for generating Clojure code, for generating documentation, READMEs, architectural design documents and much more. Above all, I use Claude for exploring architectural strategies before coding even begins. It's somewhat reminiscent of pair programming in that sense: I'd never just task GenAI with generating anything I wouldn't scrutinise very carefully. This approach works very well and allows me to quickly pick up on good design patterns and best practices for Clojure. Claude & Python![]() Overall, working with Claude on Clojure code works surprisingly well. However, this is not the case when I try to involve Claude for coding in Python, the main language I use as an AWS Solutions Architect. Generative AI struggles with creating meaningful Python tests and code – especially tests, which rarely work at all. This hampers its use as an architectural discussion partner and a TDD assistant. In fact, I've given up trying to use Generative AI for coding in Python. DifferencesI have a deep background in Common Lisp and CLOS, dating back to the 1970s. I've written Common Lisp compilers and interpreters, as many Lispers did in those days. The standard practice was to write a small kernel in assembler or C or some other low-level language, and then use it to write an optimising compiler on top of it to replace the kernel in an iterative fashion, sometimes using transformations of source code based on lambda calculus. (I still remember that paper by Guy Steele.) I see Common Lisp essentially as a big bag of good-to-haves (a really excellent one, mind you). As such, it was designed by committees over a period of decades. Clojure, on the other hand, is much tighter and rests solidly on consistently applied computer science design principles. Common Lisp is pragmatic and eclectic and thus somewhat sprawling in design. Clojure, in comparison, is smaller and much more focussed, even opinionated in nature, and for clear reasons. People attracted to Common Lisp and Clojure tend to be pretty well versed in computer science, especially Clojurians who generally have a good understanding of functional programming and immutable data structure concepts. Thus, the public code "out there" on sites like GitHub tends to be fairly advanced and of high quality. Python is an entirely different ballgame. It's one of the most commonly used languages today, and the public code base is absolutely enormous. This also means that the quality of that public code varies considerably. Also, Python is not functional at heart, and its data structures aren't immutable: side effects is the name of the game. Python programmers, though much greater in number than Clojure programmers, range from script kids to computer scientists. Thus, public Python code is much more all over the place and of varying quality. This may make it harder for a large language model to reason about. I wondered whether these differences accounted for the discrepancies in the usefulness of Claude and other LLMs as coding assistants in Clojure and Python. Asking ClaudeSo I decided to ask Claude 3.7 itself. I shared the Clojure codebase with it and asked why it thought results were so much better for Clojure than for Python. This is what it said:
It then continued, quoting the code base:
I guess this answers my question about Clojure vs Python. It's not just the functional and immutable aspects of Clojure, it's also specifying the domain stringently through design, architectural discussons, specs, and tests. The Ooloi project in particularWith all that out of the way, I then went on to describe how I use Claude as a discussion partner before code is generated, and the TDD approach I'm using where the tests of course describe the domain. Claude was almost embarrassingly enthusiastic:
I continued: "I also use Claude to create ADRs, READMEs, introductions for newcomers, Dev plans, etc. I'm quite open about this; transparency is paramount in an open-source project, and the idea is to facilitate collaborators' understanding of the Ooloi project as much as possible. This means that adherence to best practices, the use of sane architecture, abstracting away the complex stuff without compromising on performance or flexibility, etc, all are central." Claude responded:
We then went on discussing open-source strategies, tutorials and onboarding materials for contributors and much more which I'll spare you from for now. Finally, I asked it to summarise its views on Ooloi as a project:
Now, this level of enthusiasm and praise from an anthropomorphic-presenting LLM (essentially a glorified Markov chain) always makes me deeply suspicious – I'm absolutely allergic to toxic positivity, especially the kind from the USA – so I asked it "Are you sure you're not overly enthusiastic just to please me?". It replied:
I then asked Claude 3.7 to comment on my journey from Common Lisp to Clojure and on the influence from Common Lisp and CLOS on Ooloi:
And finally, I just couldn't resist asking: "What would Rich Hickey say?"
I guess that hypothetical assessment is good enough for me at this point. Still not quite sure that Claude isn't giving me a friendly reach-around, though... ;)
It's been five months since my last update on Ooloi – or FrankenScore, as it's still known in its pre-release incarnation. This silence wasn't planned; rather, it happened because life got in the way. A demanding day job, a significant career change – we had to liquidate Delegat AB and I had to find a new job as a principal-level AWS Cloud Architect – and other responsibilities all conspired to slow Ooloi's momentum. I won't bore you with excuses – sometimes one simply must pause to change course, and I really needed to devote all time and mind space to finding what I hope is my final employment. Now that I've secured a great position with HiQ in Stockholm, I can return to Ooloi with full force. Where We StandDespite the public quiet, work has continued, albeit at a more measured pace. The foundational architecture – that robust, high-performance platform for ACID-compliant transactions – remains solid. I've made incremental improvements to the core API, particularly in how it handles complex musical structures through our vector path descriptor (VPD) system. The polymorphic API is now fully mature, offering a consistent interface whether used internally in the backend or remotely by the frontend. This uniformity will prove invaluable both for our own development and for future JVM plugin creators, who'll benefit from the significant abstraction it provides. File persistence using Nippy has been fully implemented, creating a solid foundation for saving and loading pieces. This might seem a mundane milestone, but anyone who's worked with complex software knows that solid persistence mechanisms are like plumbing – unglamorous but absolutely essential, and you certainly notice when they're missing. File persistence, like high-quality printing, should be implemented early in the development cycle as they can be devilishly difficult to just tack on later. They also provide an acid test for the whole architecture. A Bit of ReflectionFive months of relative silence offers time to think. Perhaps there's value in stepping back from the constant pressure to show visible output. In such moments, the architecture is refined not through frantic coding but through careful consideration. The journey from Igor Engraver to Ooloi spans decades, and a few months of slower progress hardly register on such a timescale. What matters is that the vision remains clear and the foundation solid. After all, the whole purpose of the Ooloi project is not to "disrupt the market". Like Octavia Butler's ooloi aliens, we're neither aggressive nor competitive. What is important, however, is doing this right using modern tools. The idea is to create an architecture and a platform that'll last and that musicians and publishers will want to use. It's also to provide a powerful environment that can be easily extended through any JVM language. Ooloi has a tight, lean and efficient core, organically and seamlessly augmented by a flora of plugins for any vertical. This would include jazz, early music, tablature, etc - but also commercial plugins to support things like virtual instruments, extremely intelligent playback, or perhaps GenAI used for musical purposes. The idea is to shift the initiative to the users, not to a central committee trying to anticipate user needs. Ooloi is designed for flexibility and efficiency. Uniting these two aspects sucessfully requires careful architectural design. (And a language like Clojure for the core and the JVM for the plugins.) Community BuildingWith the core architecture stabilising, I'm thinking more about community. Ooloi is intended as an open-source project, a collaborative effort that will benefit from diverse perspectives and expertise. The extensive documentation work completed earlier – including the architecture decision records, READMEs, and technical specifications – was not merely for my benefit. It prepares the ground for future collaborators, creating a clear map of the territory for those who will join us. The website, this blog, and the growing collection of documentation all serve as beacons for those who might be interested in contributing. They signal our commitment to transparency and proper communication – essential ingredients for any successful open-source project. Looking ForwardSo what comes next? The gRPC layer for communication between frontend and backend remains a priority. This is the bridge that will allow the beautiful architecture we've built to manifest in a usable form for musicians and composers. Following that, the initial frontend work – that "Hello World" window that will serve as proof of concept – beckons. While the backend architecture is undoubtedly important, it's through the frontend that users will experience Ooloi. Getting this right is crucial. The SMuFL integration for standard music font layout continues to progress, ensuring that Ooloi will render beautiful notation with consistency across platforms. Challenges and OpportunitiesEvery project faces challenges, and Ooloi is no exception. Time constraints remain the most significant hurdle, as this is still predominantly a one-person effort with limited hours available. There's also the natural tension between getting it right and getting it done. The perfectionist tendency can be both a blessing and a curse in software development. While it drives us towards excellence, it can also delay progress if not properly balanced. The task here is to create a platform for music processing and notation. This balance has to be exactly right so that contributors can treat Ooloi like a music notation OS rather than just a bunch of API endpoints. I think the balance is right; it's looking very promising. Yet within these challenges lie opportunities. The time spent refining the architecture will pay dividends in the long run, creating a more solid foundation for future development. A Call to Potential CollaboratorsAs Ooloi progresses toward its eventual public release, I'm increasingly aware of the need for collaborators. If you're a Clojure programmer with an interest in music notation, or a musician with programming skills, your perspective could be invaluable. While we're not yet at the point of opening the repository – though a "soft release" isn't out of the question – I welcome conversations with those who might be interested in contributing once we do. The journey from FrankenScore to Ooloi – from private project to open-source collaboration – will be richer for having diverse voices involved from the early stages. Closing ThoughtsFive months of comparative quiet doesn't mean I've abandoned ship; it simply reflects the natural ebb and flow of a project undertaken alongside life's other commitments. Ooloi continues to grow, perhaps not as swiftly as in those heady initial weeks, but with steady purpose nonetheless.
I'm reminded of how musical compositions themselves develop – sometimes in great creative bursts, other times through careful refinement of existing material. Both approaches have their place. To those following Ooloi's progress, thank you for your patience. The work continues, and updates will come more regularly as we approach the milestone of public release. The vision of a modern, efficient, and elegant music notation system – one built on sound architectural principles and open to community collaboration – remains as compelling as ever. Until next time (which will be considerably less than five months hence), / Peter ![]() When I started programming in Lisp in 1979, after reading an article in BYTE Magazine, I hardly imagined that 45 years later I'd be embarking on a new Lisp adventure. Yet here we are, with FrankenScore (to be renamed Ooloi upon open-source release) – a modern music notation software built with Clojure. It's a project that brings together all my lifelong passions: music, programming, and the pursuit of elegant solutions to complex problems. The Path from Common Lisp to Clojure![]() My journey with Lisp began in an era when optimising Common Lisp compilers were cutting-edge technology. I cut my teeth implementing Common Lisp interpreters and compilers (as one did in those days), delving into the intricacies of a truly original programming language. This experience shaped my understanding of what a powerful, flexible programming language could be. And now in 2024 I find myself in the world of Clojure, a modern Lisp dialect that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. The transition feels both familiar and novel. Clojure's emphasis on immutability and its handling of concurrency through Software Transactional Memory (STM) aligns with the functional programming principles I've long appreciated in Lisp. But it's not just about the language. The ecosystem around Clojure – the JVM, the interoperability with Java libraries, the rich set of tools and frameworks – provides a robust foundation that we could only dream of back in the Common Lisp days. CLOS Thinking in a Clojure World![]() One of the more interesting aspects of this transition has been adapting CLOS-style thinking to Clojure's more data-centric approach. CLOS, with its powerful multiple inheritance and method combination features, encouraged a certain way of modelling problems. In FrankenScore, I've found myself reaching for these familiar patterns, but implementing them in Clojure's more functional style. For instance, the use of Clojure's protocols and multimethods, combined with hierarchies and the Methodical library, allows us to achieve CLOS-like polymorphism. It's a different approach, but one that feels natural once you embrace Clojure's philosophy. Clojure's deliberate avoidance of traditional object-oriented features felt immediately familiar and refreshing. It resonates with CLOS's approach, which many, including myself, have long regarded as transcending traditional OOP. Composition over inheritance, a principle I always valued even in the CLOS days, is not just a best practice in Clojure but the very fabric of its design philosophy. This alignment between CLOS's advanced features and Clojure's functional paradigm makes the transition feel natural and even inevitable. Changes in ThinkingPerhaps the most significant shift has been in embracing Clojure's emphasis on immutable data structures and pure functions. While these concepts weren't foreign in Common Lisp, they're central to Clojure's design. This shift encourages a style of programming that's inherently more thread-safe and easier to reason about – crucial for a complex application like FrankenScore. Another major change has been adapting to Clojure's more minimalist standard library compared to Common Lisp. This has led to a greater appreciation for carefully chosen, interoperable libraries and a more modular design approach. SimilaritiesDespite the differences, there are of course similarities in the overall approach. The emphasis on interactive development, the power of macros for domain-specific languages and the elimination of boilerplate code, plus the satisfaction of working in a dynamic, expressive language – these are all as present in my Clojure work as they were in my Common Lisp days. Moreover, the focus on solving complex problems through abstraction and composition remains. Whether it's CLOS or Clojure, the goal is still to create systems that are powerful, flexible, and pleasant to work with. Closing ThoughtsThis journey from Common Lisp to Clojure, from Igor Engraver to FrankenScore/Ooloi, is both challenging and rewarding. It's a testament to the enduring power of Lisp's ideas and the continued evolution of programming languages.
As I continue to develop FrankenScore, I'm captivated by the possibilities that Clojure and its ecosystem offer. While creating a powerful music notation software is the immediate goal, the project's scope extends far beyond that. It's an exploration of the synergies between music, technology, and open-source collaboration – a playground where these elements intersect and interact in novel ways. To those considering a similar journey, I'd say: embrace the change, but don't forget the lessons of the past. The parentheses may look familiar, but the world inside them is ever-evolving. ![]() A recent question in the Clojurians Slack channel caught me off guard when I was asked to compare FrankenScore to Sibelius. This request for a direct comparison not only made me pause but also brought back memories of Igor Engraver's rivalry with Sibelius – a competition that once saw Sibelius's own CEO defect to our side. However, that was a long time ago. Now, as FrankenScore carries forward Igor's legacy, I was challenged to articulate our unique value proposition in this new era. Here's how I responded: NN:
Hey, that looks promising! What are the advantages it will have compared to Sibelius? Peter Bengtson: Wow, that's actually a pretty multi-faceted question. While we're still in development and can't yet offer a feature-by-feature comparison with Sibelius, I can highlight some key advantages we're aiming for:
Importantly, as an open-source project, FrankenScore will be free to use. Many music departments struggle with excessive license costs. For those interested in more details, ooloi.org contains a wealth of information about the project, its goals, and its technical underpinnings.
![]() An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a point-in-time document that records architectural decisions and the reasoning behind them. And since communicating architectural ideas clearly to collaborators is extra important in open-source, I've just added a bunch of ADRs to the Documentation page. They cover various aspects of the FrankenScore architecture, from high-level design decisions to specific technical choices. They are:
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AuthorPeter Bengtson –composer, organist, programmer, cloud architect. Currently windsurfing through parentheses. Archives
June 2025
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FrankenScore is a modern, open-source music notation software designed to handle complex musical scores with ease. It is designed to be a flexible and powerful music notation software tool providing professional, extremely high-quality results. The core functionality includes inputting music notation, formatting scores and their parts, and printing them. Additional features can be added as plugins, allowing for a modular and customizable user experience.
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