April 03, 2015
Elena Machkasova's talk at Clojure/West is about using Clojure as a teaching language for novice programmers.
Background
Dr. Elena Machkasova teaches at the Univesity of Minnesota, Morris. She is working on a project called ClojureEd to teach Clojure as a teaching language to novice programmers. Read the papers to understand the background. This talk promises to be very interesting in terms of pedagogical techniques (how to teach Clojure and programming) and tooling/setup for beginners.
Homepage - GitHub
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
March 30, 2015
Fumiko Hanreich's talk at Clojure/West is about HoneySQL, a Clojure DSL for representing SQL queries.
Background
People in the Clojure community talk a lot about representing things as data. This is an approach inherited from its Lisp forebears. HoneySQL is a data-oriented DSL that represents SQL queries. You build up SQL statements in a structured form, not string concatenation.
HoneySQL is a good example of a case where the Clojure philosophy allows for a solution to an existing problem. The problem is that SQL is designed as a human-facing language. That's fine by itself, but it is not a good language for composing pieces of a query into a larger query--the kind of things a program would do. HoneySQL provides an intermediate representation that is way more amenable to manipulation. In a way, it does the same thing for SQL as Lisp s-expressions did for code.
Twitter
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 03, 2015
Gary Fredericks' talk at Clojure/West is about a functional approach to generating random numbers.
Background
Random number generation (RNG) is typically achieved by using mutable state. And of course, that means they're not great for parallel processing, let alone being generally harder to reason about.
An immutable random number generator returns the next random bytes and a new generator for the next number. A splittable random number generator adds a new function called split, which takes a generator and returns two new generators. It lets you guarantee that the same numbers are generated every time regardless of interleaving.
Haskell's Quickcheck uses splittable random number generators. The talk description states that Clojure's test.check, which is based on Quickcheck, would benefit from splittable random number generators, presumably by allowing for concurrency.
I found an interesting paper about an efficient implementation of Splittable RNGs. Also, the dunaj-project has some interesting work in this area, using java.util.SplittableRandom (Java 8) and Transducers.
Homepage - GitHub - Twitter
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 16, 2015
Introduction
Christopher Small was gracious enough to agree to an interview. He's giving a talk at Clojure/West about automating a chicken coop with Clojure. The background to his talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Christopher Small
LispCast: How did you get into Clojure?
Christopher Small: I actually wrote a blog post about this.
In short, I was evaluating languages with which to implement the machine learning engine for my startup, pol.is. After having done some tinkering with Haskell and OCaml, I’d come to love functional programming, and thought it would be fun to use a functional language for this project. At the time, I wasn’t aware of FP’s strong concurrency story, but learning of it pretty naturally led me to Clojure, which we went with for a number of reasons.
Since using it, I’ve fallen more and more in love with it every day. To me Clojure is the best of two worlds: the elegance and power of functional programming combined with the relaxed, fun atmosphere of python or ruby.
I’m now thoroughly addicted.
LC: How did you get into raising chickens? And what led you to try automating some of the tasks involved?
CS: My family raised chickens when I was growing up, so I've been around them since I was little.
More recently, when I moved to Seattle I lived in a housing co-op called the Ballistic Chicken Coop, so called because we took care of half a dozen chickens. The chicken run was fully enclosed, but every now and again the raccoons would find a way in and we'd loose a chicken or two. We'd patch it up, but they'd eventually find another way in. At times we'd try closing the coop door at night and opening in the morning, but that became an orchestration nightmare for the house. Also, chickens like getting up early, and we... didn't. It occurred to me that the only way to make sure they were safe -- aside from completely redoing the run, a major project -- would be to set up an automatic door for the coop. I spent some time coming up with plans and door designs, but sadly never made the time to actually build it.
There was this chicken there we called Black Chicken. She's one of the sweetest birds I've ever seen. She would sit on my lap and let me pet her, rolling her eyes back and clucking gently. We became BFFs. But at the BCC, when chickens stop paying rent, the get "evicted". Which is to say, turned into soup. While I was there, I was able to stay the hand of death, but I knew that if I moved, I would have to take her with me.
Fortunately, my wife and I were able to find a place very close by being vacated by a friend of ours who had a small flock she needed to leave behind. However, at the new place, the top of the run wasn't fenced in like at the BCC, so we had to lock them and let them out each night and morning.
As a lazy, functional programmer, this could not stand, so I finally went to work building the automatic door.
LC: What made you choose the BeagleBone Black?
CS: The short answer is that I already had one. The long answer is the reason I had one already.
The world of physical computing boards breaks down into the microcontroller and full computer camps. The former is best exemplified by the Arduino, while the Raspberry Pi is the most popular of the latter.
Microcontroller boards are nice because they draw a lot less power, but don't come with the creature comforts of a fully fledged operating system, meaning you're stuck writing in C or C++. There is a program called Firmata one can install on their Arduino which makes it possible to control the board remotely, but that would have required an 80 ft USB cable going out to the coop. Since I wanted to try hardware programming in Clojure, this class of boards was ruled out.
While the Raspberry Pi is the most popular full computer board, the BBB has some distinct advantages. The BBB has more pins, and in particular has analog input pins built in, which I needed for this project. At the time anyway, it was also more powerful and had more RAM than the existing Pi, which is a plus for Clojure/JVM programming. However, the Pi released just this Feb 2015 has upped the ante a bit, at a lower price; I'm sure there will be some tit for tat for some time here. There are a whole host of other boards out there with their ups and downs, but without getting too far in the weeds, I chose the BBB.
LC: Where can people follow you online?
CS: I'm on Twitter and GitHub as @metasoarous, and my blog/home page is metasoarous.com.
LC: If Clojure were a food, what food would it be?
CS: Had to think about this one for a while. But I'm going to go with one of my favorite fruits: the mangosteen. It's modular, elegant, and delicious :-)
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 15, 2015
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Elena Machkasova is the next interview participant. She is giving a talk at Clojure/West about adapting clojure to the classroom. The background to her talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Elena Machkasova
Nola: How did you first learn Clojure?
Elena: One of my students mentioned Clojure to me in 2009. It sounded really cool, so I included it in a class on functional programming for concurrency and was learning it partly in the summer before the course, and partly as the class was progressing.
Nola: What other languages are good for beginners or do you think clojure is the best?
Elena: To alleviate possible confusion: I don't actually teach Clojure in a beginner-level class because there are currently no tools that would make this experience smooth for new students. I've taught Clojure as a part of a couple of upper-level courses where syntax isn't that much of an issue and students are experienced enough to deal with debugging in Clojure.
Beginner CS students need to focus on concepts, develop problem solving techniques, and learn to think in an abstract, modular, data-driven way. A solution needs to be developed as a series of short, clearly defined functions). A language that supports this process without getting students distracted by unnecessary details or unpredictable behavior would be a reasonable choice. Lisp languages, including Clojure, fit into this category. We currently use Racket ( a language in the Lisp family). Python is another appropriate first language. Statically typed languages, especially object-oriented ones (Java, C++), are too complex for beginners. Languages with complex interactions with memory or their environment (C, Javascript) are not a good choice either.
Since I haven't yet tried teaching a CS1 class with Clojure, I cannot say whether Clojure is "the best" (or even a reasonable) choice for beginners, but it certainly looks promising, assuming that it is made more beginner-friendly in terms of error messages and IDEs.
Nola: What types of applications do you like to use to teach your students? (i.e., a web app, console app, todo list, recipe list etc)
Elena: So far I mostly taught Clojure at upper level and we were mostly looking into concurrency. A beginner level class is focusing on concepts, but it has to have material that students are interested in as a small project part of the course. Possibilities include data processing and interactions with graphical libraries (animation, data visualization, etc.).
Nola: What clojure libraries do you like to use when teaching clojure?
Elena: We've been looking into incorporating Quil, especially the functional mode. I've also been looking into reducers for upper level courses. Expectations is a nice testing library, definitely worth including in any level course that uses Clojure.
Nola: Why would a Mars Rover would be better programmed in clojure be better than language _ ?
Elena: Immutable data -> less possibility for error. Also, easy (i.e. less error-prone) approaches to concurrency would make large data processing fast and reliable.
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 15, 2015
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Fumiko Hanreich is the next interview participant. She is giving a talk at Clojure/West about using the HoneySQL library for Clojure. The background to her talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Fumiko Hanreich
Nola: How did you get into Clojure?
Fumiko: In January 2012, my then-former-company asked me to take an online Clojure course. They asked me to spend about 5 hours a week for the course (and my twins were barely 16 month olds then), and I thought it was doable and I said yes. The reality was that I spent way more than 5 hours a week. Just reading and “understanding” reading assignments took a lot of time before starting an assignment. Clojure was my first Functional Programming language. Then the company sent me to Cascalog training offered prior to 2012 Clojure/West, which was my very first Clojure conference. I rejoined the company in summer. A few months later, I started coding in Clojure (for production). Very steep learning curve, yet I fell in love with the language immediately. That’s how :)
Nola: What other languages have you done?
Fumiko: My very first language was C++ followed by Java at college. From the get-go, everything was OOP (and I believed that was the best thing). I have done quite a few other languages such as Visual Basic, groovy, Flex / ActionScript 3.0, php, ColdFusion, JavaScript, etc. To me, it was easy to adapt to a new language except for Clojure.
Nolq: Your talk is about SQL and Clojure, how did you decide on HoneySQL?
Fumiko: Very good question. I knew someone was going to ask thist :) To tell you the truth, I did not decide it myself. Our architect, Sean (@seancorfield), and Justin (@jkkramer), author of honeysql, spoke at 2012 Clojure conj. After that, it was recommended to me to use for the project I was assigned. I am extremely grateful that honeysql was already there when I needed it. It had everything I needed and made my life much easier.
Nola: What editor(s) do you use and what is your tooling like?
Fumiko: Emacs + paredit and Light Table. I still go back and forth.
Nola: If Clojure was a food, what do you think it would be?
Fumiko: This is an easy question. Quinoa and arugula or kale salad with lemon juice and splash of grounded ginger. Because that’s what I love and am excited to have every single day! It can also be any vegetables or fruits like mango, for example. Simply put, anything I love represents Clojure :)
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 09, 2015
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Gary Fredericks is the next interview participant. He is giving a talk at Clojure/West about Random number generation. The background to his talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Gary Fredericks
Nola: How long have you been doing Clojure and how did you get into it?
Gary: I started using Clojure in 2009 at my first full-time software job. The person I reported to was interested in experimenting with new languages.
Nola: What languages did you do before Clojure?
Gary: I learned Clojure in parallel with Ruby, Erlang, and Scala; prior to that I had only programmed as a hobby (TI-BASIC and JavaScript, both due to platform monopoly), for undergrad CS classes (Java), and for a couple minor jobs (both with C++).
Nola: What editor do you use and what is a typical workflow?
Gary: I use emacs with cider, making heavy use of the repl and in-buffer evaluation (especially dedicated scratch files for more serious efforts). I also try to invest in improving my clojure environment via my leiningen profiles and a repl utilities library.
Nola: Can you describe a good use-case for Clojure that you see has an advantage over another language?
Gary: I think Clojure has a pretty general-purpose emphasis. The result is if you buy its value proposition you'll want to use it for a broad range of things, and if you don't you'll probably not want to use it for anything, as the cost of using a less popular language will be too high.
Nola: What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen Clojure REPL?
Gary:
$ time echo '(System/exit 0)' | java -jar clojure-1.6.0.jar
Clojure 1.6.0 user=>
real 0m0.928s user 0m1.431s sys 0m0.053s
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 15, 2015
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Luke Vanderhart is the next interview participant. He is giving a talk at Clojure/West about the ReactJS Landscape. The background to his talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Luke Vanderhart
Nola: How long have you been doing Clojure and how did you get into it?
Luke: I started using Clojure in 2008, shortly after its release. I had become interested in learning a Lisp, and since I was a Java programmer up to that point I was looking for one hosted on the JVM. Fortuitously, Clojure had just been released and so I found it and started playing with it.
Nola: What suggestions do you have for someone getting started with Clojure?
Luke: Find the simplest editor that works for you, don't try to learn a new editor at the same time you're learning a new language. Don't worry about the more complex language features or libraries - just geting a good grasp of the basics (namespaces, data structures, functions, let-blocks, higher-order-functions) will give you 95% of the power of Clojure. The rest will come easily.
Nola: Your talk is about the different incarnations of reactjs in clojure, what attracted you to it? Were you big into javascript before?
Luke: I am a long-time UI programmer and have worked with all kinds of user interfaces, from 3D games to Swing to HTML to various JS libraries. It's always been a frustrating experience. I am excited about React and its associated libraries because it's the first approach to UI development that strikes me as elegant and usable.
Nola: What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen Clojure REPL?
Luke: About 11000 miles per second. Based on my latency to the REPL I'm running in a remote data center right now :)
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 15, 2015
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Morgan Mullaney is the next interview participant. She is giving a talk at Clojure/West about why clojure is good for programming games. The background to her talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Morgan Mullaney
Nola: How long ago did you learn Clojure?
Morgan: Learning a language is more a drawn-out process with lots of stops and starts than a discrete event, but I first wrote a 'hello world' in Clojure in 2011 and I've been using it "professionally" for about 2 years
Nola: What recommendations do you have for someone learning clojure?
Morgan:
Read Kyle's Clojure from the Ground Up, which is unique in that it captures the elegance and beauty of functional programming while being totally approachable to people who haven't programmed before, or who have only used imperative/OO languages.
Explore with small, discrete, hackable projects. Twitter bots are a great choice because it's quick to get one working, and there are so many neat things you can do with them. Don't believe me? Look at how neat this is.
Nola: Have you made games in other languages besides Clojure? If so, which languages?
Morgan: I've poked around with game making in Python, Common Lisp, and Twine, but nothing terribly serious in any of those.
Nola: What is your favorite computer game(s) to play?
Morgan: Gosh what a broad question. It's impossible to pick favorites, but I keep picking up FTL and Starbound over and over. One that really stands out in recent memory is Porpentine's "With Those We Love Alive" which is just moving. If you haven't already, definitely go check it out.
Nola: If Clojure was a food, what would it be?
Morgan: Hummus, with some coffee beans mixed into it. Nothing against coffee, but what is it doing in here?
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
April 15, 2015
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Nathan Sorenson is the next interview participant. He is giving a talk at Clojure/West about DSLs. The background to his talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Nathan Sorenson
Nola: How long have you been doing clojure and how did you get into it?
Nathan: I've been using Clojure for 6 years. I got into the language during grad school: the libraries I needed to use for my master's research were all on the JVM, but I was becoming frustrated with the time it took to turn my ideas into experiments in code. I found Clojure and Incanter, and the REPL-based interactive workflow I experienced was incredible. There's no way I'd have been able to spend so much time exploring my problem space without Clojure.
Nola: What languages did you do before Clojure?
Nathan: Mostly Java and C++.
Nola: Your talk is about DSLs, what other language have you used in the past if any to write DSLs?
Nathan: It's often nice to write DSLs in typed FP languages. A DSL's syntax is a quintessential example of an "algebraic data type," and ADTs combined with pattern matching will make it easy to interpret your syntax correctly. Haskell has some particularly useful features: the "deriving" mechanism, for example, gives you traversal operations for your syntax for free. Haskell also has type classes that enable an interesting style of specification called "tagless final." This approach lets you sidestep the typical interpretation overhead and compile your DSL as though it were a first-class member of the host language.
Nola: What advice would you give a new programmer to Clojure?
Nathan: I came from an imperative, object-oriented mindset and had to do a great deal of un-learning before I could grok the basics of functional programming. I personally found classic Scheme books like The Little Schemer and SICP helpful in this journey. However, everyone learns differently based on where they are coming from, so it's important not to get frustrated if you don't find someone's advice, book recommendations, or metaphors useful!
Nola: What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen Clojure REPL?
Nathan: Lots of people get distracted quibbling about the difference between European REPLs and African REPLs but that's the wrong idea. The trick is to decomplect the question into three simpler ones: what are the average airspeeds of the Starling, the Kestrel, and the Identity bird?
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.
This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.
That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.
Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.
You might also like
