My favorite programming language has made a 1.0 release! [announcement]
Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
My favorite programming language has made a 1.0 release! [announcement]
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.
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…
When storing any large collection of data, one of the most critical decisions one has to make is when to normalize and when to denormalize. Normalized data is good for flexibility — you can write queries to recombine things in any combination. Denormalized data is more efficient when you know, in advance, what the queries…
RDF is seductive. I can’t get away from it. Something about the ability to represent anything and everything in one consistent model just tugs at my engineer’s heartstrings. The problem with RDF, as I’ve discovered through painful experience, is that the ability to represent everything sacrifices the ability to represent anything efficiently. Certainly that is…
I dropped in to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure at the New York Semantic Web meetup group. Some highlights: “ยข Some programs, like compilers or theorem provers, are themselves functions. They take input and produce output. Purely functional languages like Haskell are good for these kinds of programs. But other programs, like GUIs or…
Update September 22, 2008: I have abandoned this model. I’m still using Hadoop, but with a much simpler data model. I’ll post about it at some point. … Gosh darn, it’s hard to get this right. In my most recent work on AltLaw, I’ve been building an infrastructure for doing all my back-end data processing…