Epics, Perspectives, Media

Clojure Gazette

Issue 106 December 14, 2014

Editorial

Hi Clojuristas,

Thanks again for being the best readers anywhere!

Enjoy the issue!

Rock on!
Eric Normand

PS Learn more about the Clojure Gazette and subscribe. Learn about advertising in the Gazette .

Sponsor the Clojure Gazette

I am thankful to all of my sponsors who have supported the Gazette. I've helped raise awareness for companies, jobs, and an important event. And everyone has said that they appreciate the opportunity to improve goodwill toward them in the community. If you like the Gazette and you think your company might sponsor it, please get in touch with me. Thanks!

Stuart Halloway: Introduction to Clojure Vimeo

Stuart Halloway explains some of the deeper reasoning behind the Clojure design. He shows some great code examples where he step-by-step converts Java code into Clojure code, showing how clear and concise the Clojure code is.

Call me maybe: final thoughts

Kyle Kingsbury discusses the consequences of his Jepsen work, which tests the reliability of distributed databases under network partitions. Jepsen has shown that you cannot trust these systems, even the documentation. It does not mean all hope is lost. However, it does push a lot of the work onto the application developer to build their distributed system in a way that can deal with partitions.

Parable of the Polygons

A testament to the ability of interactive software (e.g., games) to teach us about the world and ourselves. This interactive article teaches us about how small biases can have big effects. I learned that I shouldn't go to conferences where there are too many people just like

me.

Tesser: Another Level of Indirection

Kyle Kingsbury introduces Tesser, which is a system for building functional transformations (map, reduce, filter, etc) that can run locally in parallel or on Hadoop. This presentation is also a great introduction to the idea of folds and functional transformations.

How I Crossed the ClojureBridge and Learned to Code

An experience report from ClojureBridge. I am very glad to hear that it is working.

User Interface: A Personal View PDF

Alan Kay was instrumental to inventing the GUI that we all use on our computers. And yet we think very little about where it came from. In this article, Alan Kay discusses the sources of ideas that led to what we now consider commonplace but what was then a major research project.

Buckminster Fuller - Everything I Know Youtube

Buckminster Fuller has been a big inspiration to me. I wish I could be more like him in many ways. This talk was recorded as a way to document his knowledge for the world. It is long. It is dense. And it gives one a sense of what one normal person can accomplish if one only goes back to first principles and chooses a different perspective. There is a transcript .

Marshall Mcluhan - The Medium is the Message Lecture Youtube

The more I design and build software, the more puzzled I am how anyone can do it without knowledge of the work of Marshall Mcluhan. Alan Kay references him a lot, if that helps convince you. He is perhaps the first person to study media as important of themselves. For instance, many people studied the contents of books, but not the effect the existence of books had on people an d society. This perspective, in turn, opened up the field of Communications. Every time I add a new feature to a piece of software, I think about the effect it will have on the life of the users. I have a framework for doing that, thanks to Dr. Mcluhan.

Journey through the looking glass

Chris Ford implements Lenses in Clojure. Lenses are a single abstraction which represent getting, setting, and updating in a single function. They leverage a few category theoretical constructs to generalize them. Chris Ford does a great job of presenting the whole package to those of us who are not familiar with the concepts.

My Way Into Clojure: Building a Card Game with Om - Part 1

Paul Wittmann's epic take on "Why Clojure?" Lots of references!