The year of decomplecting

Clojure Gazette

Issue 1.28 - January 10, 2013

editorial

Powerful ideas

Welcome to 2013.

I missed a few issues of the Gazette because of the holidays and two simultaneous project launches. The company I work for, Scrive, has launched a new site design. I also launched, with the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, an international culinary dictionary called Nitty Grits. It is written in Clojure.

The beginning of the year is a time for looking back. When I look back at 2012, I see some important trends. Most important of all of them is the rippling out of huge ideas from the center of Clojure (Rich Hickey) outward to libraries in Clojure and beyond. The biggest idea of all was the definition of simplicity Rich Hickey presented at Strange Loop 2011. When we look at it now, it seems silly we ever equated simplicity with ease. The word "to complect" is used a lot.

Another idea is data-driven programming. Though nothing new, it is seeing renewed interest with Clojure's literal syntax. ednmakes it even more possible. More and more libraries are building "grammars" of literal data structures.

The third idea I see spreading through the Clojure meme-space and beyond is that of immutable values. Hickey asks us to rethink what we mean by "memory" and "records". Again, looking back, it seems crazy that we don't treat our records as immutable.

Enjoy!
**Eric Normand **

PS. I love to hear from you. Just hit reply!

stylish

The Clojure Style Guide(github)

I have expressed before my deep love of style guides. Something about them makes me feel warm inside. This one looks good, with all of those itty-bitty details taken care of. Weekend project idea: convert this style guide to kibit rules.

clojurize every format!

clj-pdf (github)

Create pdfs from Clojure with easy-to-write data structures. Also check out the author's other projectsand web framework Luminus.

get paid to hack clojure

Hiring! Hiring! Hiring!

World Singles is hiring. They are looking for a Clojure developer among three other jobs.

css

Simple Methods For Writing Scalable CSS Right Now

Not about Clojure, but incredibly useful for web developers. This article recently came to my attention and I bookmarked it immediately. It contains a pretty good model for organizing your CSS.

java

Project Lambda in Java SE 8(video)

Lambdas are coming to Java. How do lambdas interact with anonymous classes? How will the syntax work? Will the lambda be a closure? Find out in this video!

webapp

Moonbase

A neat animation webapp I came across. Very fluent.

music

Composing music using core.logic and Overtone - The Composing Schemer(video)

A neat demonstration of how Overtone can help you play with music theory ideas.

typed clojure

Typed Clojure - Porting Experiment (video)

Some videos of Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant adding type annotations to untype Clojure code. It's an intimate look at the work has done. Check out the other videos as well.

c compiler

Tiny C Compiler

I'm not sure why I'm including this, but here it is. I guess I just found it inspiring to see a simple and fast compiler which is fast enough to be used as a library for dynamic code generation (by generating strings of C code).

the conj

Clojure Conj 2012 Videos (videos)

The videos are coming online. I am excited!