fisher-lebo

Thank you. Your work is impressive and it is good to see someone putting forth a technical explanation like that. Much appreciated.

I get the gist of how Minecraft is constructed: just a bunch of blocks with algorithms which hide certain blocks when they aren't in the player's view.

Are there any articles about how an engine like this is built? It is an extreme level of procedural generation (apparently), but the graphics aren't blocky and as abstract, but rather pretty impressive.

In a similar vein is Eskil Steenberg's Love [1], but this is on another level entirely.

[1] http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

Macros have nothing to do with being functional, but macros are one of the major advantages of Clojure, and ideally there would be similar functionality in a language based on it (though not necessary).

I've toyed with this idea a bit (compiling a more familiar language down to Clojure).

This project in particular gives some of the benefits of Clojure (JVM, expressive language, immutability), but I don't see any easy way to add new constructs to the language like macros without modifying the compiler itself. Can you modify the grammar that is fed to Instaparse at runtime?

That being said, the current branding and name confused me initially. I was expecting a full Go to Clojure compiler, but it appears that this is mainly a language that has similar syntax to Go which compiles to Clojure, which is still very cool, just different.

There's a lot of religious imagery in the text with discussion about fractal cosmology, mysticism, Lisp's natural connection with the human mind, etc.

It seems as though the author is trying to sell a religious experience to his readers. If that is the case, that's interesting in the sense that it is certainly unlike any other programming text I've read. I personally think evangelizing Lisp should be in the form of making it more familiar, human, and relatable to the average programmer, but I can't help but to respect the sheer uniqueness of the approach.

All of this stuff is subjective. I've coded Python for some time, and I've done an entire project in Clojure.

Because I've done more Python working, reading Django's source is much easier for me than most Clojure code (even my own), but that's not to say the same for everyone else.

These are after all languages (even if they are artificial). The human brain is really good at understanding a wide variety of linguistic constructs, the main issue is familiarity and that changes from person to person.

Why did social bookmarking die? I say this in the sense that obviously Pinboard shows it is still around, but the hype and velocity that was in the space a few years back is gone.

Hacker News, Reddit, and bookmarks in your browser don't do the same thing. The former two because links you submit to them are not considered "yours" in the same way del.icio.us and Pinboard, and browser bookmarks because they are not social in the same way.

I guess Twitter does the same thing for a lot of people but it isn't as focused and it doesn't feel the same to me.

Does anyone else have any thoughts? Is social bookmarking forever relegated to a niche market or...?

Trying to map a superset of a different language to the Erlang VM would likely be much more difficult than the current approach.

I've considered Elixir as something worth picking up next, but my question is, why would I chose it over Clojure when Clojure gives me similar functionality (macros, some concurrency), but much deeper library options?