Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
I signed off my Clojure 2011 Year in Review with the words You ain’t seen nothing yet. Coming back for 2012, all I can think of is Wow, what a year! I’m happy to say that Clojure in 2012 exceeded even my wildest dreams. 2012 was the year when Clojure grew up. It lost the…
The Solution in Search of a Problem A few months ago I wrote an article called Syntactic Pipelines, about a style of programming (in Clojure) in which each function takes and returns a map with similar structure: (defn subprocess-one [data] (let [{:keys [alpha beta]} data] (-> data (assoc :epsilon (compute-epsilon alpha)) (update-in [:gamma] merge (compute-gamma…
Elise Huard wrote about why she’s not using ClojureScript. To quote her essential point, “The browser doesn’t speak clojure, it speaks javascript.” This is true. But the CPU doesn’t speak Clojure either, or JavaScript. This argument against ClojureScript is similar to arguments made against any high-level language which compiles down to a lower-level representation. Once…
Lately I’ve been thinking about Clojure programs written in this “threaded” or “pipelined” style: (defn large-process [input] (-> input subprocess-one subprocess-two subprocess-three)) If you saw my talk at Clojure/West (video forthcoming) this should look familiar. The value being “threaded” by the -> macro from one subprocess- function to the next is usually a map, and…
Warning! This post contains strong, New York City-inflected language. If you are discomfited or offended by such language, do not read further … further … further … further … This is about three categories of software error. I have given them catchy names for purposes of illustration. The three kinds of error are the Fuck-Up,…
A new year is upon us. Before the world ends, let’s take a look back at what 2011 meant for everybody’s favorite programming language: Clojure 1.3.0 was released, bringing better performance to numeric applications, reader syntax for record types, and other enhancements. ClojureScript was unveiled to the world, leading to universal confusion about how to…
I’ll be home for Christmas To fix your old PC. Please have Coke and Mountain Dew And pizza there for me. Christmas Eve will find me In Windows Update screens, I’ll be done by New Year’s If only in my dreams. I’ll be home for Christmas Installing Google Chrome, Removing malware, cruft, and crud, And…
What is a program? Is it the source code that a programmer typed? The physical state of the machine on which it is run? Or something more abstract, like the data structures it creates? This is not a purely philosophical question: it has consequences for how programming languages are designed, how development tools work, and…
After a month and about 175 responses, here are the results of my JDK Version Usage Survey (now closed): Versions: Almost everyone uses 1.6. A few are still using 1.5, and a few are trying out 1.7. Only a handful are still on 1.4. Fortunately, no one is on a version older than 1.4. Reasons:…
The most recent JDK version poll I could find was from 2008 (thanks, Alex!) so here’s a new one. Loading…