#lambdadays

Welcome to another issue of Clojure Weekly! Here I collect a few links, normally 4/5 urls, pointing at articles, docs, screencasts, podcasts and anything else that attracts my attention in the clojure-sphere for the last 7 (or so) days. I add a small comment so you can decide if you want to look at the whole thing or not. That’s it, enjoy!

Lambda Days 2016 Luckily for us functional programmers there are so many interesting conferences out there lately. LambdaDays is coming next February in Krakow, Poland. I've been in Krakow for EuroClojure and it's an awesome city, full of night life and nice people. A part from the awesome venue, the invited speakers line-up is already interesting and with that programme commitee you can't go wrong. My only worry is that is going to be too much typed lambda calculus and not enough lispy, but I hope to be proven wrong. The CFP is open and it sounds like a proper one, with final publication in the Computing and Informatics Journal.

Clojure Programming/Examples - anonymous function literal The anonymous function literal #() has many interesting knobs. It supports % %1 which are equivalents for the first argument. It then goes up to with numbers as many as you want (but don't try #(%21)). It also supports %& to collect the rest of the arguments, so: (map #(-> %&) (range 10)) will wrap each element into a list.

The Weird and Wonderful Characters of Clojure This article is very useful because it collects all the non-googeable Clojure reader weirdness, macros, functions and special forms. When you start Clojure these are the most difficult to read but after you've worked with it for a while they become your inseparable shortcuts. core.async took this exercise to a whole new level and I'm still digesting it.

Implementing a Clojure Threading Refactoring in ClojureScript Using Light Table This post by Rundis describes the work-in-progress refactoring plugin for LightTable, specifically how to deal with a map to thread-last refactoring. It uses cljs.reader and zippers to traverse the abstract syntax tree. The article illustrates the process step by step, not an easy task indeed. Very nice illustrations.

Showing a library latest version through Clojars Clojars produces a little svg for all the libraries up there. This reports on the latest available version of a library. It is very useful on all those documents where you want to copy paste installation instructions but you don't want to remember to change them every time there is a new version. A readme is a perfect place for the svg image for example. It's allowing copy&paste just fine, so all great!

The Unlambda Programming Language For those Brainfuck lovers out there, here's another interesting challenge. Unlambda is at similar level of unreadibility, but at least it's based on something strong as combinatory logic, which is at least as strong as lambda calculus in terms of expression power. Which means that to understand it you need even more thoery than Brainfuck! Amazing. So in short: Unlambda only allows function application with "backtick" and offers the S and K combinators out of the box, along with a printing function. That's it. It's Turing complete. Go surprise your friends now (disclaimer: declining responsabilities if they aren't your friends anymore after this).