Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
I’ve been fascinated with RDF for years, but I always end up frustrated when I try to use it. How do you read/write/manipulate RDF data in code? Sure, there are lots of libraries, but they all represent RDF data as its primitive structures: statements, resources, literals, etc. Working with data through these APIs feels like…
I’ve said It’s About the Libraries, and indeed, one of the major selling points of Clojure is that it can call Java libraries directly. But there’s more to it than that. Libraries are just one benefit to building Clojure on top of Java, or, more accurately, on top of Java the platform. Look around you,…
I hope I’ve demonstrated in the last few posts that Maven is pretty cool, not so scary. But the public Maven repositories sometimes leave a bit to be desired. They don’t have entries for every possible library, and occasionally they have incorrect dependencies or other metadata. Also, the process of adding new libraries to the…
I promised, in my previous post, that I would show you how to use the latest-and-greatest versions of Clojure and clojure-contrib in your Maven projects. Here’s that post. Formos Software maintains a Maven server with nightly builds of Clojure and contrib at http://tapestry.formos.com/maven-snapshot-repository/ Here’s a complete pom.xml file with dependencies on both Clojure and clojure-contrib:…
Update Sept. 4: How to get the latest builds of Clojure & Contrib Maven is a touchy subject. People tend to have strong opinions about it. But like it or not, it’s the de-facto standard for dependency management in the Java world. Clojure lives in the Java world, so that means we have to live…
Update Sept. 3: Maven’s Not So Bad. A lot of Ruby types come to Clojure and ask, “Where’s the package manager?” The answer is usually, “Maven or Ivy,” which isn’t really an answer. I discussed this in the latter half of my Philly Lambda talk (PDF slides). The problem is that Clojure is built on…
Alex Barrera wrote a nice little article about why “scalability issues” can prevent any visible progress on a web project for months at a time: Scalability Issues for Dummies. I’ve been in this position — no visible progress while redesigning a back-end — with AltLaw several times now. I’m contemplating yet another redesign right now,…
The folks at Philly Lambda, a Philadelphia functional-programming group, were kind enough to invite me down to talk about Clojure last night. No video/audio recording, but here are my slides [PDF].
Reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, I came across this passage: “One of my friends spent three months selecting a digital camera from two nearly identical models. When he finally made his selection, I asked him how many photo opportunities he had missed, how much of his valuable time he had spent making the selection,…
I haven’t posted in a while — look for more later this summer. But in the mean time, I have a question: How do you structure data such that you can efficiently manipulate it on both a large scale and a small scale at the same time? By large scale, I mean applying a transformation…