Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
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…
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…