Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Another year, another year-in-review post. To be honest, I feel like any attempt I make to summarize what happened in the Clojure world this year is largely moot. Clojure has gotten so big, so — dare I say it? — mainstream that I can’t even begin to keep up with all the interesting things that…
Why write a book about open-source software? (Not for the money. Trust me.) I’ve seen far too many “technical books” that merely regurgitate the documentation of a bunch of open source libraries. I’m happy to say that Clojure Applied, by my friends and colleagues Alex Miller and Ben Vandgrift, is not in this category. They…
This is probably my number one Clojure Don’t. Laziness is often useful. It allows you to express “infinite” computations, and only pay for as much of the computation as you need. Laziness also allows you to express computations without specifying when they should happen. And that’s a problem when you add side-effects. By definition, a…
Today’s Clojure Don’t is the opposite side of the coin to the heisenparameter. If you have an operation on a single object, you don’t need to define another version just to operate on a collection of those objects.
A short Clojure don’t for today. This one is my style preference. You have a single expression which should run if a condition is true, otherwise return nil.
A pattern I particularly dislike: Function parameters which may or may not be collections.
Another Clojure don’t today. This one is a personal style preference, but I’ll try to back it up. Say you want to define a function with a mix of required and optional arguments. I’ve often seen this:
Some more do’s and don’ts for you. This time it’s a do.’ In the JVM, when an exception is thrown on a thread other than the main thread, and nothing is there to catch it, nothing happens. The thread dies silently. This is bad news if you needed that thread to do some work. If…
Some more Clojure Do’s and Don’ts for you. This week: record constructors. Don’t use interop syntax to construct records
Third in a series, this time with some style recommendations based on my personal experience.