Clojure Gazette

Issue 1.71 April 06, 2014

Editorial

Hi there!

Clojure/West was a blast! It was fun and educational. As usual, the best part was being there and meeting all of the smart people using Clojure. But the talks were great, too!

As you can imagine, most of the links this week are from Clojure/West. I've pointed to a few of them, only. These are only a small selection of the ones that I have something to say about. You should look at the ClojureTV Youtube Channel to find the rest.

A couple of other things that have happened: the first ClojureBridge has begun! Congratulations to all of the participants. This will likely be a moment to look back on from the bright future.

The other thing is that the Web Development in Clojure videos have been released and their sales are going strong. If you need an introduction to Ring, Compojure, and Hiccup, consider picking up the videos.

Sincerely,
Eric Normand

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

Clojure

Clojure Changelog

If you weren't busy enough watching all of the Clojure/West talks, you might have noticed that Clojure 1.6 was released. There are some significant changes, especially to the hashing system. Go update to 1.6 and try it out!

Leslie Lamport

T he Essential Leslie Lamport

Leslie Lamport was named the winner of the 2013 Turing Award . I have found this page helpful in understanding his contribution to Computer Science. The page has links to the essential papers and short explanations of why the paper is interesting.

Invention not Innovation

The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental

It's no secret that I'm a big Alan Kay fan (you should be, too!). This is a very recent talk where he talks about what it takes to invent big ideas as opposed to developing ideas for production. A lot of it is psychological "tricks" to let yourself look far ahead down the curve. What technologies will be inevitable in 30 years?

Properties

Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane

John Hughes explains in simple terms and live demos the benefits of property based testing. He is the inventor of Quickcheck, a property-based testing system for Haskell. Property based testing is a way to concisely express a property of your program and have the system generate tests to check the property. The system can that report the inputs that cause the property to be violated. A property based testing library for Clojure has been accepted into contrib. Reid Draper gave a talk about it.

Hoplon

Web Programming with Hoplon

Alan Dipert and Micha Niskin explain the big ideas behind Hoplon. According to the creators, Hoplon is based on old ideas: spreadsheets and Lisp. This is a great introduction to what makes Hoplon unique and powerful. If you've been interested in understanding Hoplon, this is a great place to start.

Clojure

State of Clojure

Alex Miller presents the amazing array of stuff that's happened in the world of Clojure in 2013.

The Functional Final Frontier

In the same way, that the Hoplon talk gave the big ideas behind its design, David Nolen explains the careful thought that underlies Om. The primary motivation is to create reusable web components that can interoperate with any React app.

Clojure Gazette 1.71