Synthesis, Optimism, and Logic.

Clojure Gazette

Issue 1.64January 05, 2013

Editorial

Happy New Year!

Stuart Sierra has written an interesting Clojure 2013 Year in Review . It's always fun to look back and sum up a whole year to measure progress.

This year I have a lot of hope. Clojure continues to surprise me. I don't think 2014 will be different. There is still a lot of value to be teased out of the basic ideas of data-driven programming , decomplecting , and an explicit model of time . Homoiconicity is still paying its own way.

Also, I recently had a sale for my videos. The results were better than I ever expected. There's a lot of demand for learning Clojure. 2014 looks bright.

Enjoy the issue!

Sincerely,
Eric Normand

P.S. I love hearing from readers. Just reply to this email!

The Library to Watch

Hoplon

I normally try to evaluate everything I link to before I link to it, to keep the quality up. I was hesitant to link to Hoplon because I don't fully understand it. I don't understand very much of it, in fact. But the project looks ambitious: completely dominate all aspects of single-page applications in a single, unified framework. That includes the server backend, client/server communication, HTML generation, DOM manipulation, and JS events. The pedigree of those working on it cannot be beat. And it's an interesting approach. It's certainly something to keep an eye on.

The Developer to Watch

Timothy Baldridge

Timothy Baldridge is the author of the core.async _go_macro. Enough said. Besides core.async, he works at Cognitect, forged mjolnir , clojure-py, and plans for a version of Clojure that tar gets LLVM. He recently gave a talk at Clojure/Conj 2013 about how to use core.async . Check out his Youtube channel for some great instructional videos and follow him on Twitter . He's a nice guy. Say hi to him on IRC.

Musicality

Harmonikit

Rich Hickey presents his additive synthesis project. I find it interesting to hear how his design principles are bearing fruit even in the area of digital music.

Logicality

From Greek to Clojure!

Nada Amin and William Byrd present their tips for how to understand the more mathematical computer science papers by translating them into core.logic. Very inspiring and instructive.

Optimality

Builing an Optimistic Compiler for Dart

Vyacheslav Egorov talks about some of the cool optimizations going on in dynamic languages. His explanations are very clear. This kind of talk gives me lots of hope for the future of dynamic features.