Clojure Gazette 168: Podcasts and Statistics
Podcasts and Statistics
Issue 168 - April 11, 2016
Hi Clojurists,
Last week I went to a conference. It was a technical conference, but the technology was online business, not programming. As you probably know, I'm trying to make PurelyFunctional.tv into a full-time income. The amount of information I got was mind-boggling (my mind, in any case, has been boggled). And now I'm furiously trying to apply the best of it.
Clojure is a great piece of technology. And the world is slowly but surely coming to realize it. It's growing very well, there are new jobs popping up all the time, and there's now too many new things showing up every day for me to keep up with them. Luckily I don't consider this newsletter a source of news. It's a source of relevance. Good content is timeless. And it crosses disciplines.
At the conference several people asked me what Clojure's strong point was. What is the killer app? What could I say? Parallel computing, distributed computing, and data crunching. All things that are very important in general but maybe not so for small businesses. Seriously, most businesses don't need threads (see all the Rails/PHP/Python-based companies out there). Most businesses don't have a distributed cluster (or they do, but it's just browser <-> server <-> database, a very simple pattern). Most businesses don't have that much data to crunch. There aren't that many jobs yet.
So the question people kept asking me was why Clojure? Why invest in a relatively unpopular language when you could be selling to JavaScript programmers? I have my reasons. Some are strong reasons. Clojure is growing and I can have a bigger impact. Some reasons are not so strong. I really like Lisps (that's not a great idea to start a business on). But I'd like to extend the question to you: why Clojure?. Is it just based on your personal taste? Or something else?
Please enjoy the issue.
Rock on!
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CodeNewbie Podcast Episode 82: What is Code?
Paul Ford wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg dedicated to programming. It went triple-viral. Here this interview with him. Spoiler alert: he mentions Clojure. By the way, CodeNewbie is a great podcast. One of my new favorites.
Cognicast Episode 99: Claire Alvis
Claire Alvis created a data modeling system for Datomic. It sounds like it solves a really important problem.
Cognicast Episode 98: Daniel Higginbotham
Daniel Higginbotham (author of Clojure for the Brave and True) was interviewed on the podcast. Great stuff from a really interesting guy.
Functional Geekery Episode 48: Matthias Felleisen
Matthias Felleisen is basically a legend. He co-authored The Little Schemer and evolved Scheme into Racket, among many other things. This interview is a whirlwind tour through his work.
Erlang 19.0 Garbage Collector
Does anyone else geek out over these kind of details? I love designing these high-leverage tools (like garbage collection) that help your software handle more complexity easily.
Think Stats in Clojure: Part I Parsing the Data
Ray Miller has been writing about exploring statistics in Clojure. This is the first of five parts so far.
