Clojure Gazette 169: Web, Art, Nomads

Web, Art, Nomads

Issue 169 - April 18, 2016

Hi Clojurists,

I always love when there's a great conference that publishes videos. It makes my work of finding good material so much easier. Luckily I found a few hours today to watch some of the talks from Clojure/West, and they were all good talks.

Please enjoy the issue.

Rock on!

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Arachne

Luke VanderHart, co-author of the Clojure Cookbook and ClojureScript Up and Running, has started a Kickstarter campaign to create a new web framework. He has an interesting approach---a data-driven approach to configuration and a highly modular architecture. I think the experiment could be valuable to the community. Consider making a donation.

The State of Clojure Web Development

Dmitri Sotnikov, the creator of the Luminus web framework and author of Web Development with Clojure, responds to the new Arachne Kickstarter (see previous link).

Types are like the Weather, Type Systems are like Weathermen Youtube

Matthias Felleisen explains his very pragmatic view of types. Why are types useful? Can we add types to an untyped language? Felleisen is one of the creators of the Racket programming language and a co-author of How to Design Programs .

From Fluxus to Functional A Journey Through Interactive Art Youtube

Allison Carter gives a brief history of 20th century art and how the current swath of Clojure art projects (Overtone, Fluxus, etc.) fit into that trajectory.

Building a Legal Data Service with Clojure Youtube

Jonathan Boston and Caleb Phillips talk about one of the more difficult-to-explain benefits of Clojure. Clojure is well-designed, where design means making decisions. By embracing and working within the constraints of their chosen systems, they found a better design for both the backend and frontend. Clojure's design helped clarify how to solve their problem in a way that their competitors could not. I really appreciate these more subtle talks. They are more difficult to give but they really enrich the discussion.

ClojureBridge in Practice Youtube

Katherine Fellows and Anna Pawlicka give a really intimate deep dive into the inner workings of ClojureBridge. ClojureBridge is a great initiative to increase the diversity of the Clojure community. Topics they touch on are the curriculum, resources for organizing your own, teacher training, retrospectives, and follow-up. And just a reminder, if you do organize a ClojureBridge (or other free Clojure workshop), let me know and I'll give all volunteers and participants free LispCast courses.

Parallel Programming, Fork Join, and Reducers Youtube

Daniel Higginbotham (author of Clojure for the Brave and True ) explains the how and why of parallel programming with fun metaphors.

Functional Geekery Episode 45 - Brooklyn Zelenka Podcast

Brooklyn Zelenka started with music theory, learned a bit of category theory, then heard about Haskell. She's also a monadic nomad , traveling around and checking out the functional programming communities where she goes.

The Blessing of Interactive Development

Nikita Prokopov, creator of Datascript, talks about his criteria for proper interactive development. I think interactive development is so important. It's important for our focus and flow. Development without it becomes inhuman as we are forced to waste willpower waiting each time there's a delay. Whenever I have a long delay in my workflow, I spend some time to fix it.