PurelyFunctional.tv Newsletter 296: Design, Success, and Conj Speakers

Issue 296 - October 15, 2018 · Archives · Subscribe

Hi Clojurers,

Why is functional programming becoming more popular? I don't know if we'll ever tease out the real cause, but we can speculate.

Is it because the number of software developers in general is increasing, so of course the number of people pre-disposed to FP are also increasing?

Or is it because people are finally past the honeymoon phase of the last paradigm?'

What about the "rise" of multicore?

Or, as I currently believe, is it that the web has forced us to think about distributed systems? Functional programmers might not have solutions to the irreducible problems of distributed systems, but we have been asking these questions for a while.

What do you think?

Rock on!

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Hire Eric to work in your team

I have spots open for client work. I prefer full time engagements. If you or someone you know are interested, please reply to this email. We can get on a call to talk about your needs.

Clojure/conj Speakers Announced

Clojure/Conj 2018 is right around the corner and the speakers have been announced.

What is Success? YouTube

Evan Czaplicki, the creator of Elm, talks about what success means for a programming language, including how to build better abstractions on top of the web APIs and how to encourage a helpful community. Evan seems to be facing a lot of the same criticisms that Clojure faces. Go figure.

Towards a Theory of Conceptual Design for Software Paper

A nice paper on software design.

Clojure in Seattle: World Singles Networks

JUXT interviewed Sean Corfield about how World Singles uses Clojure.

Stu Halloway on Apropos Oct 18

We invited Stu Halloway to discuss the work he has been doing with exception reporting in Clojure. And he said yes! You can catch him live on October 18. We record the show live on YouTube. Subscribe and click on the bell icon to be notified when we go live. When you are there live, you can ask us questions. We record every two weeks on Thursdays.

Clojure 1.10.0-beta3

Clojure 1.10 is getting close to a release. Cognitect releases alphas, then betas, then release candidates. They ask that we test them against our codebases to find any problems before the release is published. If you're using Java 8 or higher, you can run Clojure 1.10.

1.10 includes better error reporting, prepl alpha, and more. This is also the first release to require Java 8 or higher. Test out the latest pre-release on your code (you don't have to run it in production) and report any problems.

Clojure Collections Currently recording

I've finished recording the lessons that are directly about the collections themselves. It was fun doing research for the less-frequently used collections. Each lesson goes over:

• Literal syntax
• Constructor functions
• Evaluation semantics
• Function call semantics
• The patterns for usage

Here they the new lessons this week: Set, List, Queue, Sorted Map, and Sorted Set.

The course is already over five hours long. There are still a couple hours left to record.