PurelyFunctional.tv Newsletter 234: 50% off, Teams, War

Written by Eric Normand. Published: July 17, 2017. Updated: July 29, 2017.

Issue 234 - July 17, 2017

Hi Clojurers,

It has been a long time since I had a sale. I mean a real sale with a big discount. It's my birthday on Tuesday and I wanted to celebrate. Why not have a sale?

The sale is 50% off any and all individual courses on the site. Use this coupon code at checkout:

HAPPYBIRTHDAY2017

In preparation for the sale, I've gone through each course and made sure the price reflects the content. Some courses are shorter and so I've made the less expensive.

Now that I look through my courses page with revised prices, I see some really good deals. core.async Patterns, for instance, is only $18 to watch it online. With 50% off, that's $9 to learn 10 core.async coding patterns and strengthen your concurrent programming skills. And there are many more like that.

It would be a wonderful birthday present to find out I'm helping you learn Clojure.

The sale ends Friday, so act quickly. I'll send out some reminders in case you miss it.

Please enjoy the issue.

Rock on!

PS Want to get this in your email? Subscribe!

Pragmatic Functional Programming

I don't always agree with Uncle Bob. But I like reading his opinion. In this case, however, he's expressed something I've suspected for a while but never had hard data about: our cores aren't keeping up with Moore's Law. It means that one of the main arguments for functional programming, namely better use of multiple cores, is not valid right now. Where has Moore's Law been going? GPUs. We don't really have a good answer for programming those. He tries to make the case for functional programming anyway.

The Programming Language Wars YouTube

Andreas Stefik approaches the topic of programming language choice with a clear and scientific perspective. We desperately need more science in programming language design.

ClojureScript is not an Island: Integrating Node Modules

The ClojureScript team is making good use of their new blog. It appears that easy NPM integration is just around the corner!

Introducing Team Clojurians

RailsGirls Summer of Code is sponsoring two women to program in Clojure this Summer. Check out this post where Saskia and Chris introduce themselves.

Build Good Software: Of Politics and Methods YouTube

Brian Troutwine talks software engineering and the political tensions between quality and profit.

The Type War, Misunderstanding, and Pragmatism

Boy, do we need more goodwill between the various camps fighting out the trench warfare. 20 years and we haven't budged an inch. David Kay talks about the tradeoffs between the current languages.

I think there's something behind this that is not talked about much: we are fighting over abstract benefits, such as the benefits of static typing, while all we really have available are concrete languages. I can agree that static typing is good but dislike types as implemented in Haskell (as an example; Haskell is great). Or I can really like macros but dislike those in Clojure (again, just an example). I often find people arguing at different levels and not being aware.

Beginning with Clojure Macros

I have been reviewing this course of mine and I'm just really proud of it. Macros are one of those mystifying topics and this course does a good job demystifying it while keeping things grounded in real thinking tools. Check out the free videos and decide whether to buy (with the discount code HAPPYBIRTHDAY2017 it's $24).

Miraj

An intriguing web framework in Clojure.