Clojure Gazette 1.12
Potpouri
Clojure Gazette
Issue 1.12 - May 31, 2012
editorial
A veritable hodge-podge of programming language tidbits
Well, I was feeling a little playful. I had some fun with this issue. It is a little of this, a little of that. I hope you like it.
Eric Normand
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down the monad hole
Why is a Monad Like a Writing Desk? (video)
This is by far the clearest introduction to monads I have ever seen. It does not go much into theory. It practically builds several basic monads by telling an entertaining story.
the computer is your oyster
Little pearls of functional wisdom. Great for diving deep into functional programming.
C3PO's friend?
Scheme is great because you can program it in a weekend. Seriously. This is a recent revision of the spec and it is 48 pages. A great model of simplicity and elegance.
clean fun
My friend Emily from England is living in Berlin. She has started a new functional programming group. Sure to be great! I wish I could go. If you are in Berlin, be sure to say hello for me. Despite what it looks like in the picture, she is not a mime.
heritable traits
Traits - Composable Units of Behavior
In a future life, I will be a programming language researcher, working at a new incarnation of Xerox PARC. Then a future Steve Jobs will brilliantly commercialize all of my work. Meanwhile, I will enjoy reading these papers and daydreaming linguistic dreams.
go FORTH and MUL
JONESFORTH ASM and [FORTH](http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob_pla %20in;f=jonesforth.f;hb=refs/heads/master)
I read this implementation of FORTH years ago and it blew my mind. It is written in a literate style. You can read it straight through like a novel. By the end you have a working programming system. I was feeling frisky so I added it here. There is a whole git repo containing it, a Makefile, and some tests.
sounds good
One day I will have to make time to learn Overtone. This is a cool tutorial for those of us who know very little.
behind the spec
Kent Pitman was instrumental in making Common Lisp happen. I was there when he gave this talk. It was eye-opening for a younger (5 years younger!) me: how one person could have such an effect on the fate of something powerful and important. This was also the same day I was introduced to Clojure.
typo-rific
Few Examples of Lisp Code Typography
This made it pretty high on Hacker News a while ago. Though not too deep, it is interesting to see how Lisp has evolved over the years. I would say for the better. The introduction of lowercase symbols and better indentation are great. And Clojure's efforts to reduce nesting helps, too.
monosyllabic beginnings
Growing a Language(video)
Guy Steele again doing his darndest to be awesome, and kicking it old-school. Fait accomplit.