My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.
I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.
This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.
Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii
Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media
Tonight we had a special edition of the Western Mass. Developers' Group as Rich Hickey made the long trek north to talk to us about Clojure, his functional Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM.
I enjoyed Rich's presentation a lot. He's clearly a very smart guy with very focused goals for the language. He breezed through the basic Clojure intro stuff to get to slides and a demo app focused specifically on concurrency issues. He walked us through almost every piece of the example app, a simple graphical simulation a couple hundred lines long. Remarkably, given that I have almost no non-toy experience with Lisp or Java, I found it mostly understandable.
He's definitely on a tear against gratuitous mutability in software. Those are my words, not his; what he said was: "Mutability is the new spaghetti code." (If this seems perplexing, reading up on functional programming may help. I know I had no idea why people were railing against mutability and state before I started playing with Haskell.)
Some miscellaneous things that I found interesting or cool:
boot.clj source file.
Rich is an effective language advocate not just because he's smart and articulate, but because he's clearly done his research and understands the relevant alternatives and tradeoffs in a deep way. When asked about Erlang, he took pains to point out the things that Erlang does well, and the differences between Clojure and Erlang that are the result of different conscious tradeoffs. Engineering is about tradeoffs.
Thanks to Lou and Chas for organizing and hosting this, and of course to Rich for making the drive and the time to evangelize Clojure to a small group of programmers in the (relative) sticks.
Comments use Markdown syntax. Your comment will not appear until approved, which may take a few hours or more. Spammers will be torpedoed.
The iPhone keyboard doesn't suck
Python one-liner of the day
7 comments
How not to advocate via Google Code
2 comments
99 problems
3 comments
The original Lego Star Wars
2 comments
Toolbot.com source code available on request
bruce
Neat Python hack: infix operators
3 days ago
David Reynolds
The original Lego Star Wars
11 days ago
Jason Davies
Python one-liner of the day
13 days ago
Paddy3118
Let's play a game: BASIC vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. PHP
13 days ago
kbob
Python one-liner of the day
15 days ago
Dan
Let's play a game: BASIC vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. PHP
15 days ago
Leo Petr
Python one-liner of the day
15 days ago
At least 21784 pieces of comment spam killed since January 12th. Thanks are mostly due to Akismet.