You can do cool and unexpected things if your entire type system is a first class citizen and accessible at runtime. With the introduction of spec, Clojure got its own distinct spin on a type system. Just as macros add another -time (runtime and compile time) where the full power of the language can be used, spec does to describing data. The result is an entire additional type system that is a first class citizen and accessible at runtime that facilitates validation, generative testing (a la QuickCheck), destructuring (pattern matching into deeply nested data), data macros (recursive transformations of data) and a pluginable error system. And then you can start building on top of it. The talk will be half introduction to spec and the ideas packed within it, and half experience report instrumenting 15k loc production codebase (primarily ETL and analytics) with spec.
