#stdlib

Got a bit hooked on streaming... again.

Was really enjoying playing warframe, so I apologize.

Meanwhile, just got some swag from @StdLibHQ guys! They even wrote a little letter (you know, that thing where you write letters on a piece of paper by hand(!!)).

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. I add a small comment so you can decide if you want to look at the whole thing or not. That’s it, enjoy!

Expert to Expert: Rich Hickey and Brian Beckman - Inside Clojure - YouTube Good introduction to Clojure by Rich himself talking with Brian Beckman. It also goes beyond the basic introduction when Clojure is compared to other languages of the ML family (for example Miranda or ML itself). Rich also gives an overview of persistent data structures internals and concurrency mechanisms.

gensym - Clojure standard library gensym is a little function that generates an unique symbol name (in the current running process). It optionally takes a prefix that will be used along with a sequential number added to the name. The main use of gensym is to write hygienic macros because it prevents clashes with environment bindings that are already in place at expansion time.

locking - clojure.core Programmatic locking is not in Clojure. Thread synchronisation and concurrency are handled at a much higher level with atoms, vars, refs and agents. But just in case you need to go low level, the locking function is still less verbose than the Java version that requires the synchronised keyword around an object instance. One use of locking could be if you use deftype with an unsynchronized-mutable field and then you need to protect updates with a lock. Use if you know what you're doing.

gasc/Clojuratica · GitHub This makes me wonder if there are still things that can be invented to work with Clojure! Also the Mathematica integration! If you are a Mathematica user but would like to code in it using your favourite language, this project is for you. Although I'm not sure is actually maintained anymore, it might make a good use case to revive it to bridge the Wolfram language instead.

Clojure Categorized Nice list of standard library categorized in a different way than the main website proposes. Is not up to date. I'm linking it here just in case one day I want to update it with the current stdlib fns. I can see a lot I never used or knew about.

Hey everyone,

Just a head's up that next Tuesday, June 24th is Ruby Tuesday! It starts at 6:30pm, and we've got some great talks lined up for you.

You can learn more and RSVP here.

What's Happening

We've got two sweet talks booked, and one more tentatively scheduled.

1. Tristan Hume will be giving us a talk called From Arrays to Zlib: Highlights of the Ruby Standard Library

You can see the abstract on the meetup page here.

2. David Underwood will be giving us a Lightning Talk on Controller Specific Assets in Rails 4

The abstract for David's talk is also on the meetup page.

3. Tentative talk (to be confirmed)

Stay tuned to see if this talk is confirmed.

Why don't you give a talk, too? :)

If you've got something you'd like to teach, or just came across something you'd like to share, you should give a talk. You can let us know what you'd like to talk about here.

Agenda and RSVP

You can see the full agenda and RSVP here.

It’s quite common when developing scripts to want to persist data. To use a database for simple persistence, even a lightweight database like SQLite, can seem like overkill. Many developers opt to “roll their own” persistence solution by writing hashes to JSON or YAML to a file. Sometimes these writes happen as the script runs; sometimes they happen at the end of the script’s execution. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a hash or hash-like data structure that persisted itself to disk for us, without us having to worry about serialising data or writing files?

@ArrrrCamp 2013 - Standard Library, Uncommon Uses by @chastell via @Confreaks

It wasn't too long ago I was working on a command line application. Luckily, ruby makes parsing the command line pretty trivial with the OptionParser. OptionParser works great if you want to specify command line arguments with flags. However, sometimes you want to accept options in a more declarative style.

The Shellwords library, also found in the standard library, may come in handy for this.

This module manipulates strings according to the word parsing rules of the UNIX Bourne shell.

require "shellwords" Shellwords.split("todo new 'Get the milk'") # => ["todo", "new", "Get the milk"]

Maybe I'm the only one, but I was not aware this existed. Sure, it may not be the most difficult thing to implement yourself. But, having not researched the word parsing rules of the UNIX Bourne shell, I'm willing to guess there are plenty of edgecases I would miss.