Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
In the early days of Clojure, I was skeptical of Clojure-specific build tools like Lancet, Leiningen, and Cake. Why would Clojure, a part of the Java ecosystem, need its own build tool when there were already so many Java-based tools? At the time, I thought Maven was the last word in build tooling. Early Leiningen…
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 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…
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…