Code Smells in Clojure: Initial Findings from a Grey Literature Review
For Clojure developers and researchers, this provides a preliminary characterization of code smells in a functional language, but the findings are incremental and based on a limited grey literature review.
This paper presents an initial catalog of 26 code smells in Clojure, including 12 Clojure-specific, 9 functional-style, and 5 traditional smells, based on a grey literature review and practitioner evaluation. Existing linters cover only 2 of these smells, highlighting a significant tool support gap.
Code smells are widely used indicators of poor code quality, revealing structural problems and areas where improvement can be made. Although extensively studied in object-oriented languages, functional programming languages remain comparatively underexplored in literature. This paper presents early results from a grey literature investigation of code smells in Clojure, a modern functional programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and is widely adopted in open source and industrial systems. Inspired by prior work on Elixir, we manually inspected developer discussions retrieved through Google search, extracted quality concerns discussed by developers, and had 44 practitioners evaluate the relevance of non-traditional smell candidates. As preliminary results, we cataloged 26 code smells, including 12 Clojure-specific, 9 functional-style, and 5 traditional Fowler smells. We also analyzed tool support and observed a significant gap, as existing Clojure linters cover only 2 of these 26 smells. These early findings provide an initial characterization of how Clojure developers discuss code smells, a preliminary set of smell-like problems specific to this ecosystem, and an early assessment of tool support for their detection.