Episode 6: Chris Houser; Clojure surveys; getting the “little things” right in languages; Yegge-rama; ClojureScript REPLs

I was stoked to reboot by talking yesterday with Chris Houser (a.k.a. Chouser), this time via Skype.  It’s good to be back!

Enjoy!

Listen:

Or, download the mp3 directly.

Discrete Topics

• The 2012 State of Clojure survey results came in recently
• Discussion on the effect of duplicate values in set literals (and duplicate keys in map literals) in Clojure (from ; here’s a link to that I described on twitter as a bit of “software archeology”)
• Clojure’s “pace of development” / cadence and the failure modes of language development
• Potentially customizing the characteristics of thread pools (and more?) used by agents and futures (from )
• Rough corners around agents, multimethods, namespaces, etc., and the potential for alternative implementations of the same
• The podcast has now been anthropomorphized into a Twitter account — tweet your questions, topics, etc. there, and
• Chouser’s precis re: Lonocloud now that he’s been working there for some months
• The sad statuses of Raposo and Longbottom, related to Chas and Chris’ respective talks at Clojure Conjand Clojure/West (link to Chris’ talk pending the release of its video)
  • Check out clj-stacktrace, the nexus for all improvements to Clojure stack traces
• Get your in; CFP closes August 24th
• What sucks about Clojure…and why you’ll love it anyway, from Clojure/West
• Engineering(,) A Path to Science: “I don’t want to die in a language I can’t understand”, Richard Gabriel’s talk at Clojure/West (video link not yet available)
• In the aftermath of Steve Yegge’s :
  • Recognition of Yegge’s prior good works, e.g. Execution in the Kingdom of the Nouns
  • What “Worse is Better vs The Right Thing” is really about, talking about how economic choices influence technology choices
• Using ClojureScript to write CouchDB views, and writing PostgreSQL stored procedures via
• Piggieback, which enables any nREPL-based Clojure tools (e.g. Leiningen, , nrepl.el, REPL-y, etc.) to start up and use a ClojureScript REPL as easily as one can from a Clojure REPL on a command-line terminal.
• nrepl.el is looking like a decent, well-supported alternative to SLIME for Emacs users wanting to use nREPL
• “I’ve been using Linux for a long time, I have low standards!”

Finally, a non sequitur: Chris kindly responded to with this fine example of an indecently-shaven specimen: