Magic, Games, Shootout

Clojure Gazette

Issue 1.85July 20, 2014

Editorial

Greetings loyal readers,

Yes, it's true. I have the best newsletter readers on the planet. You all are awesome and I'm continually blown away with the support you show me each time I ask. :)

And now, I ask for something again ;)

I've been writing the Clojure Gazette for over two years now. It's brought me joy. It's brought me pain. But I keep at it and I have grown to love it. It started on the free plan of the newsletter service but graduated some time ago to the not-free plan. I've paid for everything myself and continued to build the list.

Although the growth has been steady in the last year, ** the slope was way lower that I would have liked** . I put any marketing efforts on the back burner, not really worrying about it too much. But now, I can't ignore it.

I have recently reworked the Clojure Gazette landing page to be a little bit snazzier and I'm starting to link to it more regularly from my blog. But I need your help.

There are two ways you can help: one is to send me a testimonial. Just a short blurb about how your life is better because you receive the Gazette and a profile-style picture. Be honest! Why do you read the Gazette? I can't promise I'll put yours on the landing page, but I will send you a nice thank you. A lot of people have sent me great emails over the years, but I never asked permission to publish them so I don't feel right putting them on the page.

The second way to help is by sharing it with your friends. It came as a surprise to me, but some people have never heard of the Clojure Gazette ! If you know one of these people, it is your duty to inform them of its existence ;) And if you have any kind of internet presence (blog, Twitter, podcast, etc), I would greatly appreciate links, tweets, likes, reblogs, shares, plugs, +1s, hearts, favorites, thumbs up, high fives, pins, retweets, blogs, posts, or whatever your respective social networking technology uses. In return, I will issue fives, high fives, and low fives (unless you're too slow) to any and all at events that I frequent.

Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,
Eric Normand

PS Please follow the DISCUSS links and comment!

Of Mages and Grimoires

Reid McKenzie has created new Clojure documentation site called Grimoire and this post discusses the reasoning behind it. It looks like a cool project to make the documentation very useful for quick access (faster than ClojureDocs). It also has lots of examples and the collection is growing. I'm glad someone is working on this. Check out, as an example, the page for defprotocol . It includes, in one place, the docstring, examples, and source. I'd love to see hyperlinks in the code to their respective definitions. DISCUSS

Clojure web server shootout

Charts and graphs comparing the performance of different Clojure web server options. I'm surprised to see Jetty Ring fare so poorly. A great service to the community. It's a collaborative repo and they are accepting benchmarks. DISCUSS

Brute - Entity Component System for Clojure

I have a confession to make: ever since I was young, I've wanted to program games. So, far from bein an unbiased link curator, I do have a softspot for game-related programming posts. This one is an Entity Component System, which is a pattern for composing game objects instead of writing them from scratch each time or using inheritance. And now it works in ClojureScript ! DISCUSS

Room Key Case Study

I almost didn't link to this because it was not very technical, but then I thought that it was such a good document on so many other levels that it was worth sharing. It is well designed, well written, and well scoped. It would make a great post to email to a project manager to convince them to give Clojure and Datomic a try. DISCUSS

ki

If game programming was one of my first programming loves, programming languages have to be second. And that love has been much more requited :) ki is an interesting language: it's a sweet.js macro that expands to Javascript, but inside the macro, it's a Lisp. The compiler can run in your browser . It uses mori for its persistent data structures. Very interesting! DISCUSS

Building Single Page Apps with Reagent

Om is all-the-rage, but there are alternative React libraries out there. Reagent is one of them and this post begins with a discussion of the advantages of Reagent over Om, then goes on to show the code and what kinds of things Reagent is good at. DISCUSS

Elm -- functional reactive dreams + missile command

A smart, in-depth look at Elm, which is a great new language that's worth watching. DISCUSS

nginx-clojure

A Ring adapter embedded in nginx? Wowee, that's fast! (It's currently winning the Clojure web server shootout.) DISCUSS