Clojure Gazette 1.13
Pondering
Clojure Gazette
Issue 1.13 - June 09, 2012
editorial
A new perspective
This is issue 13. A pivotal issue if you ask me. Three months of the Clojure Gazette have gone out over email. We have over 800 subscribers now. We grow every day.
I appreciate all of the feedback I get. I know how busy people are. But I wish I got more. I have had a couple of offers of help. I have gotten some suggestions for things to write about. And I have gotten some feedback saying this is not something that people need. They said that there are already plenty of places to find links to stuff about Clojure.
And in a way the feedback is right: Planet Clojure, reddit.com/r/clojure, Clojure Pipe, etc. Plenty of places to fill up your reading queue with Clojure goodness.
But in a way, the feedback misses something important: these feeds are firehoses. While there is something to staying up to date, I would much rather read an old, seminal paper that I hadn't known of than read yet another "my first Clojure program" blog post. My initial impetus was to mine the enormous data vaults of the internet not for novelty but for quality. It has been a mild success. However, I fear that this is becoming harder to do and I want to avoid scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Now I am pondering the direction to move in. I want to increase the quality of discourse. There is room for much more deep thought and analysis in the Gazette. I am going to find that room and try to fill it.
And so, my lovely readers, please, please reply to this email. I like meeting new people. And please, please enjoy this issue, full of the ten enlightening links you have grown to expect.
Eric Normand
PS If you like the Clojure Gazette, tell your friends!
PPS Also, I love to hear what you think. Just reply to this email.
musical scientists
Richard Gabriel & Guy Steele, "50 in 50"
Though a little high-concept and self-aware, this tag-team talk has a deeper moral: that all programming languages have something to offer. By touching on the interesting points of a huge variety of languages (fifty, actually). they manage to weave together a decent history of computer languages.
cross-language pollination
A Smalltalk-like class browser for Clojure namespaces.
survey says!
Socio-PLT:Programming Language Perceptions
Surf through a visualization of a programming language survey with interesting questions like: "It is easy to debug programs written in this language when it goes wrong" and "I am reluctant to admit to knowing this language".
illiterate
Literate programming Example with Clojure
Apparently someone has tangled and woven the source code to Clojure into a literate LaTeX file. This video demonstrate how to use it.
history
Personal Computing: Historic Beginnings
Alan Kay again, giving another version of his history talk. There is always more to learn from this man.
tarp it
An interesting paper recently referenced by Rich Hickey. It gives a proposal for a way to reduce software complexity by using functional programming and a relational data model.
No SQL? No problem.
Rich Hickey speaking about Datomic. But don't be fooled: the design of Datomic includes much wisdom that can be applied to all software. Rich Hickey is carving out the future.
problem solvers
A fun way to spend your nights.
video
If there haven't been enough puns on the name "Clojure" yet in this issue, this one may take the cake. Full Disclojure is a long-running video series that teaches middle to advanced functional programming techniques in Cl ojure.
chasing your tail
It looks like they're trying to do it: bring tail call elimination to Clojure. It uses a CPS transformer and trampolines to translate your recursive code into constant-stack-space programs.