bitsai

Excellent. Since picking up (and falling in love with) Clojure a few months ago, I've had multiple "Why Clojure?" discussions with friends and co-workers. This post is short, sweet, and hits all the points I've tried to make (poorly) to others. Saving it now as ammunition for the next "Why Clojure?" discussion :)

What implications, if any, does this have for the future of JVM languages like Scala, Clojure, etc.?

As a Lisp beginner, I also really enjoyed PG's lengthier walk-through of Lisp-in-Lisp, which explains each part in more detail:

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.ps

Another vote for Accelerated C++. Great book, brings readers up-to-speed quickly on a very useful subset of C++ features.

It's also possible to use Clojure on Android:

http://riddell.us/ClojureAndAndroidWithEmacsOnUbuntu.html

... although the impression I get from the stuff I've been reading is that there's a 3-4 second delay when starting up an app written in Clojure. There were hopes that Froyo will help in this regard, but I haven't been able to find any reports on that yet. My Nexus One should be arriving this week, so I guess I'll be finding out soon :)

See here for shipping rates and import fees for various countries:

http://android.brightstarcorp.com/help.htm

Does anyone else hit a SQL error when trying to order from Canada?

I don't have an answer to the question, but thought perhaps this "Ask Reddit" discussion about "If you designed a Porn site would you put it on your resume?" might be useful:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/844pj/if_you_de...

I'm quite intrigued by the solicitation for FPS experience on the Clojure developer page.

Much functionality was moved from clojure-contrib into new namespaces in clojure itself; clojure.jar is now bigger by roughly the same amount that clojure-contrib.jar shrank :)

see[Mike]code might be an even better fit for that purpose:

http://i.seemikecode.com/

A friend and I are working through Project Euler as part of our effort to learn Clojure. My code is littered with the pattern of (map #(list % (f %)) coll) all over the place... Very glad that I read this article (and the comments), and I think it's time for me to start exploring the clojure and clojure-contrib API's in earnest.

Agreed, especially the point about alternate justifications. Using a non-centered justification would make it easier to see at a glance which fonts are monospace, which would help a lot for, say, exploring programming fonts (my primary use for font viewers).

Ah, I see. Thanks, woodall, ROFISH, for the info :)

My understanding was that since Valve brought Steam and Source to Mac, all Source games will be playable on both PC and Mac going forward:

http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/

He's one of my blogging heroes as well. He inspired me to get out of my C/C++/Java comfort zone and embark on a strange and mind-expanding journey through Ruby, Haskell, Scala, culminating in Clojure. When I got to Clojure, I immediately thought, "by golly, this looks like the Lisp Steve Yegge was searching for!" Can't wait to see his thoughts on Clojure.

I'm extremely excited about "case". It's the one thing I missed the most from Haskell & Scala.

A collection of great programming quotes from Alan Perlis (first recipient of the Turing Award):

http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html

As technomancy said, there's no way to tell what the issue was without more info, but was the Mac behind a proxy, by any chance? That was the issue I ran into when I first tried to use ELPA. Solved by setting url-proxy-services in Emacs:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1595418/emacs-behind-http...

I believe he's saying he uses Emacs.

I was using Google Chrome (on Ubuntu Lucid).

Same thing happened to me just yesterday (6/22/10). Clearing the session and cookies solved it for me as well.

Daniel Spiewak has written a fair number of Scala articles, and I've found them to be quite helpful:

http://www.codecommit.com/blog/category/scala/page/10

Thanks for the link to Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science; I greatly enjoyed it. I'm also quite fond of this Amazon review:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R6B8KO2M32P8G

I've been using/learning Emacs for a while now, which I think has made me more sensitive to certain text formatting errors. Now, when I help my spouse proof-read her academic papers, I get really hung up on things like extra/missing spaces or tabs, mis-matched parentheses, and mis-matched quotation marks, much to my spouse's amusement (and sometimes consternation).

My theory is that texting abbreviations are currently in vogue mostly because of the limitations of early texting technology. As technologies like smart auto-completion make it easier and easier to text complete words, we should see a reversion back to a more conventional style.

I'm clinging to this theory even though I have pretty much zero evidence backing it up, because the alternative, that "dat was hawt, amirite?" will eventually become acceptable writing, makes me depressed beyond words.

I wish every tech company would embrace your separation idea. The company I work for takes the open plan to an extreme: every floor is completely open, no one is separated from anyone else. For a span of about 4 months, I worked right next to HR recruiters, who are on the phone ALL DAY LONG. It was pure hell.

So we should all run our own email servers, then?