Rich Hickey Keynote, Light Table, and getting carried away

Clojure Gazette

Issue 1.49 --- August 29, 2013

Editorial

Hello, Clojurites!

Have you formed your teams for the Clojure Cup ? Signup starts soon.

I now have my plane ticket and hotel booked for Strange Loop . Are you going, too?

On a different note, I am hard at work putting together a site to sell my videos. I hope to finish it by Friday. You'll get a link to it in the next issue.

The Keynote by Rich Hickey was also released recently, which is definitely worth a watch if you like his more philosophical talks.

Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Eric Normand

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

Reading

The Perils of Future-Coding

A good example of what happens when we (developers) overthink a problem.

Comparative Literate Programming

David Nolen's core.async autocompleter post is finally published. He compares the core.async version with the jQuery UI autocompleter. Needless to say, the core.async version is succinct and separates out the control logic from the rendering code.

modern-cljs

Mimmo Cosenza has created a ClojureScript tutorial. Worth checking out if you want to get into ClojureScript.

A to Z of programming languages: Smalltalk-80

An interview with Alan Kay about his work on Smalltalk, the problems with the language, and why we haven't made much progress since.

Eagerly awaiting

Read-Eval-Print-Love

Michael Fogus is planning an "Internet zine" about Lisp and little languages. Sign up before the first issue comes out.

Software

Plumbing

This project contains the famous Graph library, but it also has some very nice, useful functions that we all write somewhere along the way.

Selmer

A text templating library for Clojure.

Pantomime, a Library For Working With MIME Types In Clojure

I found this library very useful. It did just what I needed.

Listening

Relevance Podcast: Alex Miller

Alex Miller is now working at Relevance and has plans to get the Clojure development workflow in shape. Also, this podcast has a description of the histories of Alex's conferences.

Watching

Design, Composition and Performance

I was lucky to be in attendance at Clojure/West when Rich Hickey gave this talk. The title is a double-entendre, but I'll let you gather the real meaning when you watch it. Just know that it's one of Rich's excellent philosophical talks.

Getting the feel for the Light Table's instarepl

I've been meaning to try out Light Table seriously since it came out. But I've never had the guts to switch away from Emacs. Light Table just had a new release, and this video has inspired me to give it a shot. Pro tip: don't type (launch rockets) into the instarepl.