June 19, 2013
My typical response when asked to defend a given offhand, derogatory comment I’ve
just made about PHP is to cite the most excellent
PHP is a fractal of bad design.
But, spurred, by the numerous comments hating on me for hating on PHP on
this Portugese translation
of my PHP vs Python vs Ruby vs Clojure
piece (which, to be fair, is emphatically biased), I’m going to go ahead and let the hate out now, as one big rant,
so that I have something to refer to in the future (even though I bet I’ll find it embarrassing and childish then).
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June 13, 2013
Today, I want to provide a guided tour through some of the many libraries
available from the Clojure team that don’t come distributed with Clojure. Consider
them Clojures standard library. Some came from old clojure.contrib libs, others
are brand-new, but all are great.
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June 4, 2013
You can use Clojure to do just about anything without ever needing to define anything
but functions and vars, but you’d be missing out. Clojure supports some very nice ways
to make your code more expressive – and more structured – when dealing with operations on data types.
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May 27, 2013
Clojure is developed, maintained and documented by a cadre of extremely brainy people. This is mostly excellent news for users of clojure, but sometimes, I find myself feel a bit left behind reading about features and details of the language, especially coming from a background of procedural languages.
Last year I read Rich Hickey’s blog post on Clojure’s new reducers library. My takeaways on reducers at the time were thus:
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May 22, 2013
I’m all about big wins. I could care less about incremental optimizations
if there’s a major victory to be had instead. That’s why I’m way into
multi-armed bandit testing right now.
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May 19, 2013
In January I came into possession of a new retina-display Macbook Pro. The screen is amazing, but has the side effect of making images on websites look mostly like garbage, unless the developer has taken extra steps to serve double-sized images to people with fancy screens.
I ran across this problem trying to put a screenshot of Outlook on the homepage of Addressbin.com, my latest project. I knew it looked fine for almost every other visitor, but it was jarring for me, and presumably to anyone with a retina screen.
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May 13, 2013
Writing Clojure is not like writing Java. In Java, exceptions are an accepted part of the workflow; in Clojure, they are begrudgingly supported out of necessity, but generally avoided.
Why is that?
Probably because writing code that throws exceptions makes your functional code a lot less functional – that is, a lot less composable. When you can’t trust a function to execute and return a value you lose some functional purity.
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April 7, 2013
I’ve been talking a lot about Clojure lately, but the pool of people who
want to listen is pretty small. I know, I know, it’s pretty different, but
I promise it’s really cool – maybe even better than the languages you already
know – once you get to know it. So today I want to
step back to the very basics by outlining how to get a Clojure app
up and running, and maybe produce some more Clojurenauts in the process.
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April 5, 2013
As a second part in what I’ve decided will be a series attempting to justify
my choice of Clojure as a general-purpose web language, I’d like to talk a
little bit about writing asynchronous code in Clojure, and just how easy
the design decisions made by Mr. Hickey make that.
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April 2, 2013
Before I begin, the ideas in this article were introduced to me by
this blog post,
which I consider a must-read for anyone who uses Clojure on the web.
I’ve been using Clojure for web development a lot more lately. This can be a contentious
topic for some people. “Clojure is hard to hire for”, they say. “It’s for
pretentious nerds”. “It’s overkill for the web”.
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March 25, 2013
Here’s a toy program I wrote implemented in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure.
I hope it’s helpful for someone who knows at least one of those and wants to learn
another.
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February 28, 2013
I was told the other day that my communication style (as interpreted by
cover letters I sent) had changed dramatically for the better over three
years. Thanks for that! So I thought I’d share in hopes of helping someone
else do the same.
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January 3, 2013
Trending, by Tapfolio, is an iOS app for tracking stocks, available now on the app store. It makes viewing your stock portfolio’s current pricing a snap, and sorts on most changed so you always see what you want to know about.
Also, I just started work at Tapstream, a company which may or may not be affiliated with Tapfolio. It seems pretty rad, and I’m really looking forward it.
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December 21, 2012
Welcome to the new blog. I hope you like it, I made it myself.
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