Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
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…
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].
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…
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…
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…
I dropped by the Java Users’ Group meeting last week since Rich Hickey was there to talk about Clojure. I expected a bit of carping from the Java guys, and at first they were all “efficiency this” and “security that.” But by mid-way through the talk I think they were getting it. A few even…
The most famous piece of Lisp-related vaporware is vapor no longer: Arc has been released. After paging through the tutorial, I’m a bit underwhelmed. It looks like just a bunch of syntactic sugar implemented on top of Scheme. Clojure is more interesting and more innovative. Clojure and Arc have some things in common: data structures…