PurelyFunctional.tv Newsletter 238: History, Abstraction, Play
Issue 238 - August 14, 2017
Hi Clojurians,
I have a few things to get off my chest.
The first one is that Building Re-frame Components is officially launching right now. The sale starts now. If you use the coupon, you'll get 25% off the price of the course at checkout. Of course, if you are a member, or you bought it during Early Access, you'll still have access and don't need to buy anything new. For those who haven't bought it yet, you have until Friday to get 25% off. I'll remind you a couple more times before the end.
- Coupon: FLOWING
- Discount: 25% off of Building Re-frame Components (applied in the cart)
- Expires: Friday, August 18
When I started planning this course, lots of people were asking for practice implementing common web UI patterns. I did some searching for lists of patterns, and found a bunch of good stuff. I picked ones that were interesting enough to demonstrate the hard choices you have to make when working with Re-frame.
So that's what the course is about. It's practice for building those little to big UI elements you have to get right every day. It's 8 hours of video and each lesson comes with an interactive exercise to practice the coding yourself. You can access the exercise online on the page for the lesson. I've also put up a repo set up with Figwheel with all the exercises to run it locally.
I've been getting a lot of compliments on my recent Re-frame articles that I've been sending you. Thanks! It really helps to know that you appreciate them. I worked hard writing them and, well, it's hard to know what people think.
We have access to all of this new technology that lets me be in contact with thousands of people. I always appreciate questions and comments. And that brings me to the second thing I want to talk about. It seems that people have been frequently sending one message in particular recently: that some of my courses are old. I feel a little ashamed saying it, but my courses are falling out of date. When I make a course, I try to pick something that is stable and timeless. But even then, some of the courses go out of date.
In addition, the newer courses have more features and, since I'm getting better at making them, the newer ones are often better. Sometimes I take a look at my older stuff and wish I could give them some love to revamp them. After the Re-frame sale, I'm going to spend a good amount of time going through my back catalog of courses to bring them up to date (or outright retire them, if need be).
The fixes will help new members because they'll get higher quality courses throughout. I hope it also helps existing members. If you have a course you'd like to see updated, I'd love to hear about it. I'll keep you posted on the updates as they happen.
Okay, third thing: I was in the French Quarter today, not far from the venue for Clojure SYNC. I don't know how better to show you how awesome this location is than to just show you with my phone. So that's what I did. Here's a 4-minute video (YouTube) showing how close Le Petit Theatre (the venue) is from one of the most beautiful spots in New Orleans. Beware: there is jazz in the video. Tickets go on sale soonish.
Please enjoy the issue.
Rock on!
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A Mind at Play
This biography of Claude Shannon was excellent. I felt like I got to know the person. But, more importantly, the authors do a great job of bringing you into the idea landscapes that existed when he did his work. The book captures the experiences of Claude Shannon that led up to his groundbreaking theory of information. Definitely read this book.
Programming the Turing Machine YouTube
Barbara Liskov on the history of modularity in programming languages.
Clojure Concurrency
I've been recording new lessons for this old course as part of the effort I mentioned before. There are now over three hours of video covering different concurrency primitives in Clojure.
New lessons this week:
Driven to Abstraction
A profile of Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov. What an amazing person.
Oral History of Adele Goldberg
Adele Goldberg worked with Alan Kay (read his glowing appraisal of her) on Smalltalk. This history goes over her background, her work at Xerox PARC, and the ventures she had after that. I sure would like to have her speak at Clojure SYNC!
[[meta]](https://github.com/degree9/m
%20eta)
[meta] looks like an interesting attempt at building a "startup stack" using ClojureScript on top of other tools: Hopolon, Feather.js and Electron.