Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Update August 13, 2041: This approach may now be obsolete with the introduction of pipeline in core.async. Update April 27, 2015: the date 2041 in the previous update is a typo, but updates from the future ties in nicely with the async theme so I decided to leave it in. ✻ ✻ ✻ Say you…
In the early days of Clojure, I was skeptical of Clojure-specific build tools like Lancet, Leiningen, and Cake. Why would Clojure, a part of the Java ecosystem, need its own build tool when there were already so many Java-based tools? At the time, I thought Maven was the last word in build tooling. Early Leiningen…
I’ve been thinking about how to build up software systems out of stateful components. In past presentations and blog posts I’ve alluded to a standard interface I use for starting and stopping stateful components: (defprotocol Lifecycle (start [this] “Begins operation of this component.”) (stop [this] “Ceases operation of this component.”)) Most of my Clojure programs…
We have a problem. We are professional software developers who work with open-source software. The problem is that we are in the minority. Most open-source software is written by amateurs. Every time a hot new technology comes on the scene, developers flock to it like ants to a picnic. Those early adopters are, by definition,…
I have a new post up on the Relevance blog: My Clojure Workflow, Reloaded. It’s a description of how I work with Clojure interactively using the REPL, tools.namespace, and Leiningen.
Common Lisp the Language (CLtL) devotes an entire chapter to the subject of Scope and Extent. It defines scope as the textual region of a program in which an entity may be used, where “entity” could be a symbol, a value, or something more abstract like a variable binding. So scope is about where you…
Quick, Clojure programmers, what does the following expression do? (get x k) If you answered, It looks up the key k in an associative data structure x and returns its associated value, you’re right, but only partially. What if x is not an associative data structure? In every released version of Clojure up to and…
Version numbers are meaningless. By that, I mean they convey no useful information. Oh sure, there are conventions: major.minor.patch, even/odd for stable/development versions, and designations like release candidate. But they’re just conventions. Version numbers are chosen by people, so they are subject to all the idiosyncrasies and whims of individuals. Semantic Versioning, you say? Pshaw.…
I have a confession to make. I’m bad at open-source. Not writing the code. I’m pretty good at that. I can even write pretty good documentation. I’m bad at all the rest: patches, mailing lists, chat rooms, bug reports, and anything else that might fall under the heading of “community.” I’m more than bad at…
When I was in acting school (yes, I was in acting school, see my bio) one of my teachers had an expression: playing the obstacle. When studying for a role, one of an actor’s most important jobs is to determine the character’s overall objective: What’s my motivation? The plot of any play or movie typically…