Clojure Weekly, July 15th, 2015
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!
llava llava is lisp syntax that drives Java. You can think of it as a precursor to Clojure. It is old stuff but nonetheless interesting to see how certain problems were solved at the time. If you scroll to the bottom you can see a brief explanation about the motivation for the project and the differences with Kawa (at the time). At the moment can't really understand if it requires a generation step followed by normal compilation. Will investigate further.
Clojure Made Simple - YouTube This Rich Hickey's talk from JavaOne 2014 recently became available. It's introductory but plenty of good points to convince programmers to try Clojure. There is a good list of DSLs in Clojure for example. It also contains a "Objects are like marionettes" rant worth watching alone (around 33'). At the end it contains updated numbers and stats about Clojure adoption and community status.
Curry On! - YouTube CurryOn videos will appear here in the following days. There are many talks worth watching as soon as they land here. The first two already available (at the time of writing this) Cliff Click (I read the slides already) and Evan Czaplicki of Elm fame. I'm looking forward to Phil Wadler and Zach Tellmann too.
alias - clojure.core | ClojureDocs The standard core (alias) function creates a link between a symbol and a namespace symbol name, in the current namespace. It is equivalent to the :as keyword used for :require a namespace (which is the preferred form). I didn't see it used often. One last case was with reader-conditionals where compilation is different between clj and cljs and you want to alias a namespace differently for the two languages.
weavejester/duct Doing some comparisons around component libraries and concepts these days. Duct is a fine example of simplicity. What I like is that it comes with templating and generators to create a skeleton app that contains just what you need to start with. Documentation is terse and clear as well as the principles Duct is based on. One of them is about configuration that is kept under a clean interface but accessible as a namespace dependency. lein setup in a Duct project will create all the local overrides for development. Impressed by the low amount of code to quickly create a prod ready webapp.
mfikes/replete It had to happen at some point. Let's see if I can explain: cljs compiler can compile cljs into JS. cljs needs big dad Clojure to bootstrap into the compiler that compiles cljs into JS. But differences between cljs and Clojure nowadays are down to just a few essential parts. So a cljs program can be pointed at the cljs compiler/analyzer to compile that into JS. It is then possible to read cljs as a string and to eval it in a pure JS environment. Replete is just that REPL inside a web view on iOS. Metacircular enough.
clojuTRE 2015 More conferences coming. This one sounds pretty interesting because it's free, short 20 minutes talk and only half a day, giving prominence to the usually unofficial corridor chit chat. The awesome post conference party is also advertised, including the definitive sauna experience for those interested (I would probably go just for the sauna alone :).
tobyhede/lein-git-deps If you know what you're doing this can be an interesting plugin. With this you can use a project on Github as a dependency to your project, similar to normal dependencies with Clojars. Of course you're depending on HEAD of some project so anything can happen at any time, including suddenly breaking compilations and what not. At the same time it can be handy for projects that aren't yet on Clojars or to test a feature that only exists in the current non-released version. Handle with care.
Kats Conf 15 Many mixed-functional conferences appearing lately, this is another interesting one in Dublin in September. The price is ridiculously low but the line-up in interesting with a mix of academia and industry speakers. It's a one day conference on a Saturday which will probably bring together some FP enthusiast in a pub and some sightseeing the day after (hangover permitting).
