disclojure: all things clojure

Today in the Intertweets (July 28th Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:44:56 +0000

Example of #websocket based chat using #clojure and #jetty 7 by Chris McDevitt, in GitHub repo with deps (here, via @maclausen) — The example code in github is not new, but in its original form it was somewhat involved to get it to work. This blog post explains how to do just that.
We are sponsoring the Clojure Language Development Project (here, via @contegix) — From the press release it looks like the sponsoring will come in form of free hosting of servers. That’s great news!
Preannouncing Seph – Immutable Ioke/Clojure-like JVM language (here, via @hncomments) — Ola Bini writes a blog post detailing the design principles for his new language Seph, one of these principles being “Stealing is Good”. On this note he decides to ‘borrow’, amongst other things from other places, Clojure’s persistent data structures, the concurrency primitives (all of them) and the STM. I wonder if he will also start sporting a mullet? Jokes aside, Seph is based on Ioke, also from Ola. Seph is a homoiconic language that supports prototype-based OO. Since Ioke is very experimental, Seph is designed from the ground to be solid enough to be used in real applications. Seph was presented at Emerging Langs a week ago, and here are the slides.
Some ideas on how to write event-driven applications in #clojure using #aleph (here, via @ztellman) — Zach Tellman outlines his work in progress on a framework to develop event-driven applications to work with aleph, the non-blocking nettty-based web server. In this article the author introduces channels and pipelines as basic abstractions.
Couple more seats remaining for the Bay Area Clojure Bootcamp – learn #Clojure in a single day! (here, via @amitratore) — Learn Clojure from “Clojure in Action”’s author.

Today in the Intertweets (July 27th Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:11:15 +0000

#clojure web dev, WAR style using #gradle (here, via @wmacgyver) — Following Mark McGranahan’s recent article about building webapps with Clojure, this article provides a different view: use gradle to build webapps that can be deployed as a WAR file on a standard JEE web server (and using clojuresque and Enlive)
Clojure: Destructuring (here, via @AgileCarnival) — A tutorial on to the powerful feature of destructuring in Clojure.
Why do Java programmers love Scala and shy away from Clojure? (here, via @ScalaAtSO) — I wouldn’t want to feed the beast, but I found this discussion somewhat enlightening. Clearly, the programming language world is big enough for people who will never like s-expressions and the ones who will.

Today in the Intertweets (July 26th Ed)

tbatchelli — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:04:20 +0000

Clojure Tips from the Experts. More tips coming in. (here, via @IndianGuru) — You can still send your tips in, but this is the current list of tips. Pay attention to the one from @fogus.
jvm language summit starts today. day 3 has #groovy talk by Jochen Theodorou and #clojure talk by Rich Hickey (here, via @wmacgyver) — This is in Santa Clara, CA. In the previous edition of this summit, Rich Hickey gave his now famous keynote “Are we there yet?“. Looking forward what he’s got up his sleeve this time!
Corecursion in Clojure (here, via @trzmiel) — This is advanced Clojure. Corecursion is not an easy concept to learn, but a very useful one. This article tries to explain how corecursion works and how it can be used.

This weekend in the Intertweets (July 25th Ed)

tbatchelli — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:47:32 +0000

Learning about #clojure Pods, a possible new feature similar to transients but better, from Rich Hickey at #emerginglangs (via @disclojure) — Yes, I was there. Rich Hickey presented his current work on Pods (previously named Cells) at the Emerging Languages Camp in Portland, OR. The room was packed with language developers and some ‘tourists’ (i.e. yours truly), and a total of 26 languages were discussed.
- So I wrote up a review of the @emerginglangs conference last night. Awesome times (here, via @technomancy) — This review of the conference provides the most complete and accurate summary of what Rich Hickey presented.
- Long blog post on OSCON’s Emerging Languages Camp (here, via @deamwampler) — This is an more detailed description of the conference, but with less emphasis (and accuracy) on Clojure.
Clojure dropbox API (here, via @coder_tim) — Access the Dropbox API from Clojure (provided you are registered as a Dropbox developer). This API will allow to store your users’ data in their own Dropbox accounts.
#clojure contrib deprecation policy (here, via @wmacgyver) — As the march for Clojure 1.2 progresses, it is time to clean-up clojure.contrib since, for example, some functions have moved to clojure.core. This document explains the deprecation policy; in summary, things are marked deprecated one full minor version (the ‘x’ in 1.x) and possibly removed the next one, so you have that window of time to stop using deprecated functions.
Writing blog post – collection of #Clojure tips (with code) for newbies. Email me at satishtalim [at] gmail.com (via @IndianGuru) — This is a request for Clojure programming tips. All worthy tips will end up published in a summary article.
Developing and Deploying a Simple Clojure Web Application (here, via @planetclojure) — This is a relatively long and detailed post by Mark McGranahan, the author of Ring (amongst other interesting projects). The post covers all the steps that will allow you to create a Clojure web-app, deploy it on your local machine or even on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. It is a great summary of tools and techniques.
Did you know about versioning? This time about #clojure infrastructure. (here, via @kotarak) — A plea to all Clojure library developers to follow a simple and unified versioning scheme, so we all can keep our sanity (these last words are mine)
Programming Hadoop with Clojure (here, via @alexott_en) — A detailed rundown of how to write Haddop applications with Clojure and Stuart Sierra’s clojure-hadoop libraries. It even includes a full example and a bunch of useful links, so it makes it very easy to get you started with Hadoop.

Today in the Intertweets (July 21st Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:08:00 +0000

Список рассылки про #Clojure на русском (here, via @alexott) — A Clojure mailing list for Russian speakers.
Nice to see a huge list for cheatsheets including Clojure, Haskell, F#, Erlang and a ton of frameworks (here, via @mattpodwysocki) — You can find a list of Clojure chatsheets here.
Announcing unfix, a Clojure library for prefix and postfix notation (here, via @fogus) — Cool, now you can use clojure with pre-fix and post-tif notation. Cool! Now we need someone to remove those pesky parenthesis and add some semicolons here and there and we’re all good. And also, get rid of that immutability stuff while you’re at it ;)

As a side note, the Emerging Languages Camp is a hit. Lots of new and old crazy ideas flying around, and I would not be surprised if this event kickstarts a new wave of cross-pollination between these languages. It was interesting to see how Clojure is referenced quite often as inspiration for some of these new languages. Also, out of about 80 attendees, it seems that at least 50 of them are developing a new programming language!

Today in the Intertweets (July 20th Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:33:14 +0000

Better late than never. I finally got access to the Internet, just to realize that there is some kind of ‘virtual’ language war going on: Clojure vs Haskell vs Scala vs … vs who-knows-what-language. Oh well! The mandatory link to “Someone is wrong on the Internet” can be found here.

Here is what happened in the last few days:

In-Depth Book Review: Practical Clojure (here, via @acangiano) — A review of the recently published book “Practical Clojure“, by Luke VanderHart and Stuart Sierra. Summary: a good book that could use some more non-trivial examples.
Better #Clojure test results on the command line. Changes reporting of “lein test”: diffs, clj-stacktrace and color (here, via @brentonashworth) — This is about this fabulous new tool that helps you find out quickly why your tests failed, deview. In this new release, you can run it from the command line (via lein) and get the results right there. Before it would be html based so you needed a browser to see the results.
Instant clojure REPL: cljr + nailgun = big win (here, via @antoniogarrote) — A couple of scripts that will set you up using cljr with nailgun. The end result is Clojure starting very fast, as there is no need to instantiate a new JVM every time you call cljr.
Getting Started w/ Google App Engine & Clojure (here, via @linksgoogle) — This is the PDF of an article appeared at this months’ issue of IEEE Internet Computing, and it’s about programming web apps in clojure to be deployed within the Google App Engine infrastructure.
Leiningen 1.2.0 is out; biggest release yet … have fun, build some Clojure. (here, via @technomancy) — Lots of fixes and many new features that will make lein easier to adapt to your workflow.
Continuing my series of micro-interviews with Clojure Hackers I present (take 7 (david-nolen)) aka. @swannodette (here, via @fogus)
(->> (load-workbook “spreadsheet.xlsx”) (select-sheet “Price List”) (select-columns {:A :name, :B :price})) (here, via @mjul) — If you read the code carefully you’ll realize that what it is doing is the following: open an MS Excel spreadsheet and read some values from one of the sheets. Pretty impressive for a tweet, don’t you think? This is @mjul’s creative way to announce docjure, a library for reading and writing MS Office documents with Clojure. This library wraps Apache POI, so all the restrictions of POI also apply here.

Today in the Intertweets (July 15th Ed)

tbatchelli — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:34:39 +0000

a question on hacker news… chime in… “why should i care about #clojure?” (here, via @SeanTAllen) — In order to motivate you to chime in, here is the mandatory link to “somebody is wrong on the Internet”
Next #clojure training at Mountain View on July 31st by @arathore and me – only 6 spots left (here, via @sivajag) — If you are in the Bay Area and want to learn Clojure from the pros, here is your chance.
Get @chrishouser’s “The Joy of Clojure” for %40 off until July 22nd with code ju1540 (here, via @fogus) — Just in case there is any reader that doesn’t have it already…
most watched java project on github – clojure :] (via @pbadenski) — How is that a Java project?
Aw shucks, that upstart Norvig knocked #Clojure off #1 (here, via @stuartsierra) — Nah, it didn’t. Not at least when I checked it out; “Practical Clojure” is, at the time of writing this, #1 in the “Bestsellers in Lisp” category :)

A quick note from your humble Clojure Tweets curator: I’ll be going to the Emerging Languages Camp next week, driving up to Portland, OR from the Bay Area with my family. My wife is in charge of getting us rooms along the way, and I know for a fact that one night we’re staying at a farm, sooooo… my Internet access during the next week is very up in the air, and the Intertweets might not come daily.

If you’re also going, then I hope I’ll see you there!

Today in the Intertweets (July 14th Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:22:22 +0000

As disclojure hinted yesterday, Clojure 1.2.0-beta1 is out. Congratulations to all and many many thanks to Rich and crew for pouring countless hours and brain cells into this project. From what I am gathering from comments here and there, this beta release might not cause a huge disruption in the young Clojure ecosystem, since there are many projects out there that were already using a pre-beta version of Clojure 1.2.0.

Download Clojure and Clojure-contrib 1.2.0-beta1 from here, and make sure you check the release notes here, as they are full of good news!

Other things happened today:

Clojure, Multi-core, AWS Cluster Compute & Lattes (here, via @hkrnws) — Now that Amazon announced the availability of Cluster Compute instances, which are big machines that you can reserve to be used in exclusivity, David Nolen went ahead and did some scalability tests with Aleph, at $1.60/hr for a 8 CPU machine. Not too bad.
#clojure asynchronous http client (here, via @wmacgyver) — Built on top of Ning’s open sourced async-http-client, which in turn is built on top of Netty. Netty is getting a lot of love lately :)
I find it humorous that #clojure 1.2 is “beta” – we’ve been using it for 6 months (via @dysinger)
If deview is too much for you, then take a look at lein-difftest. Just like “lein test” but with diffs. (here, via @brentonashworth) — Yesterday we mentioned this promising and very useful project to aid in testing and determining why tests failed. Now today the same author brings us a plugin for leiningen to make using Deview very easy.

Today in the Intertweets (July 13th Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:04:39 +0000

The Scala camp’s answer to Clojure’s Incanter (Yes, it’s fun to pretend there’s a rivalry between the two) (here, via @MSch) — Scalala, Scala Linear Algebra Library.
How to setup Clojure from scratch (here, via @acangiano) — With emphasis on the “from scratch” part. Kids, don’t do this at home without adult supervision. Use Lein or cljr instead.
TheDeadline is now in the Google Apps Marketplace. This is Clojure/Compojure on App Engine. Consider my mind blown. BLOWN (here, via ikai)
Better #Clojure test results with deview. Shorter stacktraces and diffs. (here, via @brentonashworth) — From the article “Deview runs yours tests and reports test failures and successes. If an exception is thrown, clj-stacktrace is used to clean up the stacktrace. Deview will then filter it down to show relevant (according to me) trace elements” and “When a test fails, the difference between the expected and actual results are displayed” . Check out the full article to convince yourself of how awesome this project is. Source code here.
Changeset [9c01e1faf5]: prepare for 1.2.0 beta1 Branch: 1.2.x by stuart.halloway (here, via @clojuredev) — Does this mean what I think it means? If so, Clojure 1.2.0 beta1 is around the corner!

Today in the Intertweets (July 12th Ed)

tbatchelli — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:04:21 +0000

Awesome! The 20 minute form of my “Clojure for Ninjas” talk was accepted at the Stange Loop (via @brweber2) — Strange Loop getting VERY interesting! Try Ctrl+F “Clojure” on that page…
Wadler’s Law (extended to Clojure) (here, via @fogus) — A true statement. Feature discussions on Clojure are much more focuses on parenthesis than in semantics.
Joe Duffy’s Blog: “Thoughts on immutability and concurrency” (here, via @buckybit) — This article from a Microsoft engineer and published author discusses the need (or not need) of immutable data structures. It’s main thesis is that immutability comes second after isolation, and if you can break your program to be isolated — either by breaking it into independent functional parts via data parallelism — then data immutability is neither needed nor desired. And even in situations where immutability could be a big win, it is not a perfect solution since now the developer has to reconcile the possible different states of the same piece of data. Good article and food for thought.

This weekend in the Intertweets (July 11th Ed)

tbatchelli — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:49:37 +0000

Get Acquainted with Clojure at #DevConLondon with ‘An Introduction to #Clojure’ (here, via @DevConLondon) — Neil Ford from Thoughtworks will be introducing Clojure at London’s DevCon 2010 conference.
Thoughts on Clojure (here, via @acangiano) — Antonio Cangiano is a Technical Evangelist at IBM. This is an article about Clojure from the Ruby point of view, since Antonio is a published Rubyist. Spoiler Alert: he likes Clojure.
Awesome new Clojure resources: (1) http://clojure-examples.appspot.com/ (2) http://clojuredocs.org/ (via @kumarshantanu) — Speaking of which:
- Alpha of http://clojuredocs.org is up! Need your help with examples & feedback (via @napple) — Zachary, somebody beat you to the tweet! (I report tweets in strict chronological order)
- Proof-of-concept “examples” macro for the REPL (here, via @jkkramer) — So you can access the examples from http://clojure-examples.appspot.com from your REPL. From the same author as the website.
VoltDB client app written in Clojure. (here, via @arielweisberg) — VoltDB is a “scalable, open-source SQL DBMS with ACID” … take that, noSQL! Anyway, in the linked repository there is some code of a clojure interfacing with this DB performing basic CRUD operations.
#clojure aleph with mysql, postgresql, mongodb, and @couchdb (here, via @wmacgyver) — David Nolen tests the performance of the interfacing of Clojure with several databases using aleph as a middle tier. Very basic testing, take it with a grain (bucket?) of salt.
Clomert, a very-very early version of an idiomatic Clojure client for Voldemort (here, via @strlen) — Voldemort is yet another noSQL database (how many already?). It is used at LinkedIn, for example. Very WIP, feedback requested.
Internet, I give you http://www.clojurls.com news and other bits about #clojure (via @dermattias) — New entry in the Clojure News space (getting crowded around here…). In one page you get tweets from selected clojurians, blogs, mailing-list, StackOverflow and other sources, all related to Clojure.
Environment Passing in Clojure (here, via @mmgrana) — If my memory is correct, this is not the first post about this issue. When you bind a variable in a new thread, the binding does not get passed to this thread’s child threads (i.e. if you perform a pmap call). This post proposes a simple solution that will carry forward the existing bindings to the new child threads.

Today in the Intertweets (July 8th Ed)

tbatchelli — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:03:18 +0000

Using #clojure with #aspectj’s around advices (here, via @edgargoncalves) — How to advice clojure functions from Java.
Clojure’s edge on Node.js (here, via @HNTweets) — This is actually about aleph, the new NIO/Netty based web server for Clojure. In a very basic benchmark it shows it can be faster than node.js (8,500 vs. 7,000 req/s). David Nolen wrote this benchmark.
I just added the inital release of my #Leiningen plugin to the #IntelliJ plugin repo (here, via @janthomae) — For now you can run leiningen goals from within IntelliJ. Work in progress.

Today in the Intertweets (July 7th Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:19:50 +0000

Aleph, an asynchronous web server, written in Clojure (here, via @stilkov) — Zach Tellman just announced an asynchronous web server built on top of Netty and it mostly conforms to Ring’s interface. This server uses NIO for managing network communications, and also decouples threads from requests, which is important to scale.
- Someone is already having good result with aleph (#clojure+netty). beating node.js in hello world is no small feat. (here, via @wmacgyver) — Nice! Throughput increased 7x over Jetty.
Added Roger Bodamer on Scaling MongoDB and Chris Houser talking about Clojure and the expression problem (here, via @strangeloop_stl) — Nice, 2 talks about clojure already (the other one being by @marick)
On Lisp’s (clojure) Readability and Parenthesis Stacking (here, via @jneira) — An article proposing that trailing parenthesis is better than stacking them. (Added for completeness, but…are we seriously discussing indentation styles?)
High Level Testing with a High Level Language (here, via @planetclojure) — A summary of a year and a half of using Clojure to test Java code. Worth reading because it shows where the impedance can be found when trying to get a Java team to use functional languages.
New blogpost/screencast: Trail blazing innovators – Use Emacs! (here, via @LauJensen) — This post tries to explain why some developers chose Emacs as an IDE. Good tips on Clojure debugging :)

Today in the Intertweets (July 6th Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:28:08 +0000

Building a scrum board application in clojure using compojure and plaza (here, via @antoniogarrote) — clj-plaza is a library to work with semantic meta-data. If you’re interested in knowing what this Semantic Web is all about, this article is a good place to start.
Another #Clojure micro-interview. (take 6 (anthony-simpson)) (here, via @fogus) — Anthony Simpson is also known as Raynes or @IORayne, of try-clojure.com fame.
Frink, Factor, Newspeak, Kodu & Clojure. You could be speaking one of these soon. via @radar Emerging Languages Camp (here, via @iRomin) — I will be there; any one here also going?
Deadlock #Clojure agent: (send-off a #(do (deref (future (await a))) %)) — A deadlock?!? in Clojure?!?! that can’t be true!
“–> macro proposal” thread in the #clojure group was an interesting read (here, via @pedroteixeira) — Interesting indeed, although it got a little heated!
The fourth #clojure user group meeting is tomorrow, July 7th, 2010 at the @integrallis’ office. See inclojure.com. Hope to see you there (via @inclojure) — That’s in Columbus, OH.

Today in the Intertweets (July 5th Ed)

tbatchelli — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:40:47 +0000

#clojure netty adapter for ring just showed up. Should be usable in #compojure too (here, via @wmacgyver) — Netty is a NIO-based event-driven framework that, amongst other protocols, it handles HTTP. This project hooks the fast the HTTP support in Netty into Ring.
Clojure: Ein pragmatisches Lisp für die JVM (here, via @heisedc) — Heise Developer publishes an article from Stefan Tilkov about Clojure. The article is titled “Clojure: A pragmatic lisp for the JVM”
Uploaded the Pune Clojure Course outline slides. May not be useful standalone. (here, via @ghoseb)
Finally pushed my work-in-progress #clojure wrapper for #cassandra (would love feedback) (here, via @trptcolin) — Cassandra is a highly-scallable dristributed DB opensourced by Facebook. This project wraps the Thrift API to interact with the database. This is work in progress.
Replaced the core data structure (mutable, Java) used by one of the hottest loops I’ve got w/ an immutable clojure deftype. Equivalent perf! (here, via @cemerick) — woo hoo!
State of the semi-vaporous Lazytest (here, via @stuartsierra) — Stuart wrote clojure.test some time ago. After seeing its use in the wild, he saw some problems with it. He is now writing Lazytest with the idea of creating a new testing framework without the flaws of clojure.test. This article outlines where is Lazytest today.

This weekend in the Intertweets (July 4th Ed)

tbatchelli — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:33:16 +0000

Just released Radagast, my Clojure test coverage experiment (here, via @technomancy)
If you are tracking bleeding edge #clojure, it’s been moved from github.com/richhickey to github.com/clojure (via @wmacgyver)
making #clojure records more pleasant to import, create, and print (here, via @david_mcneil) — An enhanced implementation of ‘record’, one of the new features slated for Clojure 1.2. This alternative implementation allows you to work with records in a similar way you work with other data structures on Clojure. It allows you to pretty print the contents of a record and to create new records without invoking the Java constructor; two things that are not possible with the current ‘record’ as defined in 1.2
New Course: Clojure for Beginners. Course fees to be donated to the #Clojure project (here, via @IndianGuru) — Starts Monday July 19th, and costs $5. The entire proceeds will be donated to support the development of Clojure.
Nu: lisp on objective c. (think clojure for cocoa) (here, via @hkrnws) — I thought you guys would be interested on this…

Today in the Intertweets (July 1st Ed)

tbatchelli — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:28:50 +0000

#Pune #Clojure Course. It’s free. (here, via @IndianGuru) — Bring your own laptop, July 3rd and 4th, from 10am to 5pm, by Baishampayan Ghose, a.k.a. @ghoseb, of Planet Clojure fame.
This is what I’m doing to reference records in a different ns in #clojure – look right? (here, via @puredanger)
My own Tetris written in the Clojure programming language :) (here, via @StackedCrooked) — Nice! I just copied the code into the REPL and I found myself playing tetris a few seconds later (it’s a swing app, in case you were wondering…)
First cut at Trammel doc for `contract`. Criticism welcomed (here, via @fogus) — Trammel is project to bring Contracts Programming to Clojure. The author is looking for feedback, so don’t be shy!

Today in the Intertweets (June 30th Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:38:29 +0000

lein plugin to find a graph of #clojure namespace use/require dependencies. Can output graphviz dot format. (here, via @hugoduncan)
Release 0.1.1 of Midje, a Clojure mocking tool (here, via @AgileCarnival) — We’ve reported about Brian Marick exploring the possibility performing Test Driven Development in Clojure. During his exploration he drafted a mocking tool for Clojure. This tool is now at a usable level.
what’s nice in #clojure is that ;-) is an actual comment (via @cgrand)

Today in the Intertweets (June 29th Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:52:25 +0000

Seattle people: come talk and write Clojure this Thursday at 7pm (here, via @technomancy)
Bitcask is one of my favorite open source projects, so I’m anxious to see how this “Bitcask for Clojure” evolves (here, via @mmcgrana) — This is about Amontillado, a bitcast-inspired storage for Clojure and in Clojure. Bitcask is a key-value store with very nice operational properties. Work in progress.
Clojure development with IntelliJ’s La Clojure Plugin (here, via @taoeffect) — A screen cast showing how to setup IntelliJ IDEA to work with Clojure projects and a few tricks.
in case anyone is curious and wants to try clojure for themselves (here, via @seancorfield) — New to Clojure? This is for you.
Bob Martin announced the arrival of Clojure as the Future of Computing in a concurrent world (here, via @IndianGuru) — A few weeks ago there was a tweet-storm coming from RailsConf 2010 about Bob Martin suggesting everyone to try out Clojure at the keynote speech. Well, here is the video. Worth watching, if anything, for its entertainment value.
alter-ego – A Reactive AI Library in Clojure (here, via @xampl) — This is an implementation of behavior trees. This is used quite commonly in video games to power the brains behind the ‘enemies’.

Today in the Intertweets (June 28th Ed)

tbatchelli — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:46:40 +0000

Planning a one week online #Clojure introductory course in July at rubylearning.org (via @IndianGuru)
Introducing Gaka (here, via @planetclojure) — a CSS-generating library, a la SASS. There is plenty of examples here. Work in progress.

This weekend in the Intertweets (June 27th Ed)

tbatchelli — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:31:35 +0000

#clojure web dev survey (here, via @wmacgyver) — The author of Compojure asks the developers of web applications using clojure for some feedback. Join the conversation if you are one of them.
Interview with @Fogus, #Clojure #Git #Github #Haskell #Java #Lisp #Scheme #Scala (here, via @TheGeekTalk)
Interview with @chrishouser, the author of The Joy of Clojure, #Clojure #Scala #Vim (here, via @TheGeekTalk)
Encounter with incanter – about clojure, incanter and bioinformatics (here, via @walshtp) — “So I borrowed someone’s `Programming Clojure` book, got onto some websites, downloaded incanter and gave it a spin this week. And my verdict: I’m impressed.” That’s coming from a heavy R user. Incanter allows data processing and data analysis all in the same language.
Enhanced primitive support – where things stand today, from Rich Hickey (here, via @disclojure) — Rich Hickey posts a summary of all the changes related to the new support for primitive types in Clojure. More details here.
I’ve been doing some work on a Clojure package manager to replicate the ease of installing packages in R. (here, via @liebke) — Enter “clj”, a clojure REPL and package management system. It complements Maven and Leiningen in that instead of providing support for project-oriented jobs, clj provides similar support for ad-hoc jobs. It also makes starting Clojure much easier and provides a nice out-of-the-book experience for newbies.
Yay! Pune Clojure Workshop is finally happening. If you responded to my survey, you should’ve received an email by now. (via @ghoseb) — Cool, training also starting in Asia. That makes it the third continent.
Leiningen 1.2.0-RC2 is out. Please test it with your Clojure projects (here, via @technomancy) — A few fixes.
Clojure’s n00b attraction problem (here, via @taoeffect) — This article is from someone who is new to Clojure and reflects the pains that newbies have to go through to get a workable Clojure environment. The author argues that for Clojure to really take off, the out-of-the-box experience for newcomers needs to be improved a lot. He also points out that there are too many different ways to achieve a working environment and that there seems to be no “officially sanctioned” way to do so, leaving those aspiring clojurers with the taks of making decisions that they are not ready for yet.
First #conjlabs is now completed, hope everybody took some valuable skills with them home. Looking forward to planning the next session! (via @LauJensen) — If you are in Europe and want to learn Clojure from the European experts, they are planning a new session for sometime in September.

Today in the Intertweets (June 24th Ed)

tbatchelli — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:28:00 +0000

Here’s my blog on using Clojure and the plaza library to muck about with RDF data from my #semtech demo yesterday (here, via @puredanger) — This is an overview of how to handle semantic data in Clojure with clj-plaza, a project created by Antonio Garrote. It contains a brief introduction to Clojure but that’s because this blog post is from a presentation to a user group not knowledgeable in Clojure itself.
Clojure simultaneously rescues lisp and the JVM. (via @arthuredelstein) — ’nuff said.

Today in the Intertweets (June 23rd Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:17:50 +0000

Interesting interview with Robert Martin @ rails conf 2010 (here, via @letronje) — Robert Martin (a.k.a. Uncle Bob) gave a keynote talk at this year’s Rails Conf, in which he suggested everyone to try Clojure. Here is the video of the keynote plus a short interview.
wonders if this means we’re only a week from #clojure 1.2 (here, via @craigandera) — July 1st target date?

destraction, n. removal of unnecessary abstraction so that data can be manipulated generically (via @stuarthalloway) — Great! A new word… now, care to produce an example?
- destraction example: servlet request, response, session, cookies, filters, et al => functions and maps #clojure #compojure (via @sturathalloway) — Great! Thanks!
#clojure programming by contract lib from @fogus official site is live (here, via @wmacgyver)
#clojure #compojure web framework 0.4 released (here, via @wmacgyver)
New blog engine up and running: http://briancarper.net/ code here (via @BrianCarper) — Brian rewrote his blog engine (called cow-blog) built on Clojure and Compojure. He also makes this new version of cow-blog’s code available on github.
Jeff Rose totally gets it (here, via @stuarthalloway) — Stuart points us at a rebuttal to this article rebutting Rich Hickey’s reasons for not implementing actors in Clojure.

Today in the Intertweets (June 22nd Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:49:21 +0000

From the looks of it the first #Clojure meetup in Sweden had more participants than *all* #Lisp meetups in Sweden. Ever! ;-) (via @rplaca)
atticus now has a macro for defining #clojure defrecord instance factories for use in testing (here, via @hugoduncan) — Atticus is a novel mocking framework from Hugo Duncan.
Finite State Machine Implementation in Clojure (here, via @planetclojure) — Another very approachable article from Nurullah Akkaya.
“You’re all sitting on the end of the food chain, eating gazelles and saying, ‘who needs photosynthesis to be easy’?” (here, via @stilkov) — This is in reference to the effort to have Clojure efficiently work with primitive types without the need to promoting them into objects. The goal, raw speed. In this post to the Clojure list, Rich Hickey why efficient use of primitive types in Clojure is so important, even if it comes with some inconveniences.
Ask HN: Who’s using Clojure, and to do what? (here, via @HNTweets) — Interesting read. Pay attention to the complaining about how difficult/slow it is to submit patches to Clojure and Clojure/contrib

Today in the Intertweets (June 21st Ed)

tbatchelli — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:44:00 +0000

June London Clojure Dojo – 29 Jun – City of London, UK (here, via @ukdevevents)
calx, a opencl wrapper for #clojure (here, via @wmacgyver) — “Calx is an idiomatic wrapper for OpenCL, which is an abstraction layer for parallel computation” . Work in progress.
#clojure “equal” branch updated again, now it auto box loop arg when recur mismatch happens, also gives warning (here, via @wmacgyver) — Quoting Rich Hickey “I’ve added the speculative analysis required to detect when recur arguments fail to match the type of primitive loop locals, and recompile the loop with those loop args boxed. When *warn-on-reflection* is true it will issue a report that this is happening and why”. At this point, if you don’t know what this is about, start reading here, you only have 196 posts to go…
never before have i managed to refactor code using common #lisp. #clojure has it working(early but functional state!) (here, via @edgargoncalves) — A few nice refactorings in there: thread, unthread, extract fn, and more!
Pallet, #clojure based cloud provisioning, configuration and administration, release 0.1 (here, via @hugoduncan) — So there: release 0.1 is out; get it while it’s fresh.
(take… An ongoing series of micro-interviews with Clojure hackers. First up: David Edgar Liebke. (here, via @fogus) — Aptly titled as “(take 8 (david-edgar-liebke))”, this is the first in a future series of short interviews with noted Clojurians/ers/istas. This first one is with the creator of Incanter.

This weekend in the Intertweets (June 20th Ed)

tbatchelli — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:03:03 +0000

A Clojure mail lib (here, via @al3xandr3)
If you care about default num behavior in #clojure read this and give feedback. Pls read rich’s post on overflow vs safety. (here, via @wmacgyver) — So in order to make calling functions faster in Clojure, Rich proposed the possibility of having functions take primitive values as arguments. This presents a new kind of problems; should primitive numbers be promoted to BigInt/BigFloat? when? … interesting read.
- #clojure new primitive support revised (here, via @wmacgyver)
Denormalizing One million records with Clojure. (here, via @jneira) — in 13 seconds.
Lazytest returns with new improved syntax! (here, via @stuartsierra)
Slides from my talk on metacircular evaluation at last night’s CAPCLUG (here, via @fogus) — Or how the magnificent 7 became the magnificent 3. Is there a video of this?
Actors in Clojure — Why Not? (here, via @dalnefre) — This is a rebuttal to Rich’s reasons not to implement Actors in Clojure (look for “Message Passing and Actors”. The author provides detailed counterpoints to each of the arguments that Rich presents. Will we see actors in Clojure then?
Another design sketch for Clojure coverage tool (here, via @lshift) — In a previous article, the author proposed a macro that would instrument functions by wrapping their definitions. In this article the author proposes similar functionality but without macros. Work in progress.
Executing A Command Line Program With Clojure (here, via @samnewman)

Today in the Intertweets (June 17th Ed)

tbatchelli — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:07:45 +0000

Dear Clojure people: please read my Leiningen tutorial and tell me what you think! (here, via @technomancy) — Leiningen 1.2 is getting close to being released, so head on to the tutorial page and provide feedback if need be.
Integrate #sproutcore with #clojure and #mongodb! (here, via @teropa) — Sproutcore is an HTML5/AJAX application framework that lets you build complex and interactive web pages. The linked page is one of their tutorials, which happens to use Clojure/Compojure for its backend.
God created Clojure, everything else evolved from a stupid fish. (via @siah) — Aren’t we taking this a little too far? Plants didn’t evolve from fish…
Enclojure plugin cannot be installed on NetBeans 6.9. sigh. (via @Kumappus) — Don’t get trigger happy with the update button on Netbeans if you’re using it for Clojure, as it will break. Wait for the Enclojure update instead.
“Clojure already beats the pants off of any other JVM language. Now it’s chasing them down the street, wacking them with a spoon” (via @nainostrebor) — Oh, yes, so Uberconf is going on these days and Stu Halloway is offering a workshop on Clojure. I had over 350 tweets in my inbox today to read and most of them where quotes from Stu. Looks like he was blowing some minds!
Every time you mention Scala and Haskell in the same sentence, a Java developer thumbs through a Clojure book at Borders. (via @davetron5000) — I don’t mean to throw gasoline into a flamewar, but I thought this one was funny (if not accurate)
Enhanced primitive support being considered in Clojure (here, via @scode) — So the ‘num’ branch now has a corresponding wiki page describing its goals: making clojure faster by allowing functions to receive primitives as parameters and be able to return them as return values, and thus avoiding a lot of boxing and unboxing of these primitives into the correspondent objects. This option and its implications is being heavily discussed in the mailing list as I write this. Join in if you want to shape the future of Clojure, or just to read and learn from the pros.
Azul opensources their managed runtime tech. This is important for Clojure and all multithreaded JVM software (here, via @disclojure) — If your Clojure apps are running on the newer Xeon processors and on top of Linux, you might be able to see big improvements in performance when this is integrated in your JVM (OpenJDK for now). This will give us almost imperceptible garbage collection pauses, and ability to manage very large heap sizes without a sweat (much over 2GB). This is important since Clojure targets multi-processor machines and you don’t want its scalability to be limited by the GC pauses and the amount of usable memory.
TDD in #clojure, the final part. (here, via @marick) (Parts 1 and 2) — This part has some conclusions (develop top-down or bottom-up for TDD?) and proposes a new mocking framework as a result of this experiment.

Today in the Intertweets (June 16th Ed)

tbatchelli — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 07:50:12 +0000

TDD in #clojure Part 2 (in which I recover from a stupid blunder) (here, via @marick) — This is a second installment in a series of articles about TDD in Clojure (the first one is here). In this article the author continues his TDD process until he hits a roadblock with his plan. To summarize, in Clojure you might have to think about data representation earlier than you would probably do with OO languages, where this representation is hidden away (and thus less of an issue when creating mocks)
The beauty of letterpress and craft and old arts faithfully renewed (here, via @cemerick) — Very tangentially related to clojure, but the author reflects on why some of us are looking back at Lisp and thinking… those guys got it right.

Today in the Intertweets (June 15th Ed)

tbatchelli — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:15:51 +0000

Em Tempos de Copa do Mundo… (original and translated to English, via @danielfmt) — Post in Portugese about how to code a system to manage World Cup-related sweepstakes in Clojure. Very useful these days!
Just threw out my first snapshot release of my Github API bindings for Clojure. \o/ (here, via @IORayne) — Hmm… will we be able to one day manage Git from the RELP? ’cause that’d be awesome.
Online video of a (German) talk I did on Clojure (here, via @stilkov) – This is an intro to Clojure for German speakers.
Joy of Clojure chapter 8 MEAP update just hit your inbox (via @fogus) — And from there it went straight to my iPad.
Clojure IO cookbook (here, via @grantmichaels) — The many ways of doing I/O in Clojure.
#clojure: now way, way faster. (here, via @alandipert) — So now there is another development branch “num” that allows some numerical code to work 10x faster. The linked page shows such speedup in the fibonacci function by just putting some type hints in the function signature, leaving the body intact.

Today in the Intertweets (June 4th Ed)

tbatchelli — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 06:05:24 +0000

ClojureCheck is back. QuickCheck for #clojure (here, via @kotarak) — A specification-based testing library for Clojure that is somewhat based on Haskell’s QuickCheck. It provides facilities to easily generate random test data in order use it to “prove” certain properties of the code under test. This article explains very well why such library is needed and how it works.
Asking for feedback on syntax for mocking #clojure protocols using Atticus (here, via @objcmdo) — The author added support for protocols in the recently released mocking library Atticus and now wants to hear from you.
Aff to @uberconf to do a full day of #clojure tutorials! (slides here, labs here, via @stuarthalloway) — Priceless slides.
My take on relational mapping in #Clojure (here, via @brentonashworth) — “Carte is an attempt to bring simple relational mapping to Clojure. It is also an attempt to do relational mapping in a way that complements Clojure.” This article explains how Carte works, from model definition to querying the model.