Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
CANCELED: My presentation is canceled. LispNYC will still meet at the Sunburnt Cow, 137 Avenue C, and I’ll be there to talk about Clojure. But no slides, no video, etc. My presentation is postponed to the June meeting. I’ll be talking about my work with Clojure at LispNYC on the evening of Tuesday, May 12.…
There’s a big ‘ol thread going on down at comp.lang.lisp about Clojure vs. Common Lisp. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say that Clojure and Rich Hickey are holding their own against some of the top c.l.l. flamers. But all the arguments about functional programming, software transactional memory, and reader macros miss what…
Just a little self-promotion: I’ll be presenting at the New York Hadoop User Group on Tuesday, February 10 at 6:30. I’ll talk about how I use Hadoop for AltLaw.org, including citation linking, distributed indexing, and using Clojure with Hadoop. Update 2/28: My slides from this presentation are available from the Meetup group files.
Up at Cornell, Tom Bruce has a post about the problem of funding open access to legal materials. This brings to mind a conversation I had with a doctor friend recently about AltLaw. My friend, accustomed to the open-access requirements of NIH grants, was frankly shocked that there are no comparable rules for legal decisions.…
It’s interesting to see the first signs of rebellion against RSpec. I jumped on the RSpec bandwagon when it first appeared, mostly so I wouldn’t have to write “assert_equals” all the time. But while I liked and used RSpec, I don’t think it made my tests any better. If anything, they were a little bit…
A small post for the new year (in which I have resolved to write more). The standard introduction to object-oriented programming teaches you to create a class for each type of thing you want to deal with in your program. So if you’re writing a payroll program, you would have an Employee class, a Department…