- Anyone interested in the JVMOne idea, please leave comments here (via @michaelgalpin) — This is an interesting idea to produce an alternate JavaOne conference focused on the JVM itself and all the languages that run on it. It looks serious :) Please send your comments!
- Template to create a GAJ app in Clojure (here, via @lispcoder) — Now you don’t have an excuse anymore for not creating Clojure apps for Google App Engine. Here it is a template; you just need to fill in the blanks with your awesome clojure code and you’re good to go! Ah, it also builds using lein and clojars.
- Good answer on why I should learn Clojure (here, via @mraible) — “So, Clojure ‘wins’ or is ‘worth trying’ because of the experience of using it, not because of some particular bullet point, which all languages feel like they all have.” The author creates somewhat of a circular logic response: you can only answer the question “why should I learn clojure?” by learning clojure, which makes total sense once you’ve learned Clojure.
- Mashups Using Clojure (here, via @catch_down) — Another engaging and approchable article from nakkaya.com, this time not about controlling Arduino via clojure, but about creating mashup applications in Clojure. The final application is for mapping earthquake data over Google Maps.
- Help me simplify the #clojure contrib build with #Maven (here, via @stuartsierra) — Stuart Sierra is moving the build script for clojure-contrib from Ant to Maven. Hopefully no religious wars will start at this time. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer Maven too…
- How to get La Clojure working again (here, via @gstamp) — so here is how you make La Clojure plugin work again after upgrading to IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.1. The nature of the solution just highlights how absurd it is that we have this recurring problem of La Clojure getting out of sync with IDEA’s releases.
- Fantastic, @tomfaulhaber’s Autodoc, html doc generator for Clojure, is now generally available! (here, via @liebke) — “Autodoc is a system for generating HTML documentation for Clojure projects. It is used to create the up-to-the minute published API documentation for Clojure itself, the Clojure-contrib library, and the statistics package, Incanter.” We’ve all used the fruits of this cool application. Many many times.
- I’ve posted my #leiningen plugin for building #hadoop job jars. Feedback would be awesome! (here, via @xefyr) — The plugin creates haddop-compatible jar files.
There’s no link for ‘Mashups Using Clojure’ but I’m assuming it’s: http://nakkaya.com/2009/12/17/mashups-using-clojure/
You are absolutely right! And with this it makes two days in a row that I forget one link :(
Thanks for noticing!
I suspect that emotional resonance is the way we pick the languages we love. The day job is another matter. And what better way to illustrate the ineffability of such things? Paradoxes, broken metaphors, and circular logic.
Like Windows vs Macs. You’ll never have a solid, completely rational reason to try the one you don’t normally use. You just have to be curious.
And maybe that would have been a better answer. (Well, and some proofreading.)
Keith, I agree with you that the question of whether it is worth to learn a language or not is a chicken or egg problem. When you learn a new language like Lisp, your brain changes in the process; you see things that you didn’t see before. You see ways of solving problems that you didn’t see before, and you will most likely be working at a different level of abstraction. Unfortunately you cannot explain the gains of learning a new language to someone who is new to it. I mean, you can explain the benefits, but the listener won’t really grasp them. Not until they learn the language and write a good amount of code with it.
I thought your answer was on the spot highlighting that the question cannot be answered truthfully with a feature by feature comparison. It wouldn’t do justice to any language.