May 22, 2012
Chris Granger:
the real potential is in making it trivial to build domain specific tools
Chris is definitely onto something valuable. Eclipse has had plugins for a long time, but they were always expensive to write. Emacs has been programmable forever. But it looks like Chris is making it even easier still and in a more modern package.
Imagine being able to create these sorts of experiences on a whim instead of needing hundreds of hours to even get something simple working. If you couple that with the generalized editing capabilities I showed last time, you have what we believe to be the future of tools: an environment that you are able to mold to the exact shape of your problem.
Without diminishing the great work Chris is doing, I have one question: has this not been the promise of personal computing since its conception at Xerox PARC?
Thank you, Chris, for bringing these ideas back into the realm of possibility.
May 16, 2012
Nice animation which follows an email sent from a computer to a mobile phone.
May 16, 2012
I am really excited about an interview with Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant on the Clojure Gazette that will be coming shortly. Be sure to sign up if you want to get it.
You may want to say hi to Ambrose on Twitter.
May 15, 2012
A great talk by programming language legend Guy Steele. (referenced in Rich Hickey's recent post.)
May 15, 2012
Rich Hickey:
I hope this makes reducers easier to understand, use and define.
It does.
May 11, 2012
Doh! This looks like a library that I have that is 90% ready to release. Though mine takes a slightly different tack.
I guess I will have to get it ready for release.
May 11, 2012
I can think of many uses for this. Store datapoints in the cloud. Prebaked analysis plugins. Some relational semantics in the query language.
May 11, 2012
James Hague (of Programming in the 21st Century fame):
I've had an off and on romance with Forth. It's such a subversive language; you can fit an entire Forth development system into the space taken by the executable header of a "Hello World" program generated by a C compiler. But I've finally decided that the whole Forth concept is too minimal in the modern world. It's like using an artist's paintbrush to paint a house. The Forthers will respond with comments like "If you think you need to paint the house, then you haven't thought about the problem enough." They'll suggest that a tent will keep you dry as well as a house and is much easier to maintain. Meanwhile, someone with a big, bulky brush is almost finished with the first coat of paint on the house. There has to be a happy medium between a 20K Forth and a C++ compiler than won't fit on a Zip disk.
A great metaphor for programming in Forth.
May 10, 2012
Rich Hickey is still finding ways to apply simplicity to programming language design. It is amazing what can be done by starting your work by looking up a word in a dictionary instead of applying common practice.
