Posts tagged: WMASSDEVS

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.

I just wanted to post a quick note for anyone who is in my region and interested in functional programming that the Western Mass. Developers Group is hosting a presentation by Rich Hickey, creator of the Clojure language, on March 20th.

This event was put in motion by Lou Franco, who is doing a “20 days of Clojure” series on his blog in the days running up to the event. Chas Emerick has arranged the meeting space. See the event listing for more information.

Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant. Links and commentary:

• The Talk Like a Pirate Day site was a victim of its own success this year. After several hours of record-breaking traffic, Chris nobly disabled the site to protect paying customers on the server. I’m looking forward to the white paper, “How to serve one million unique visitors one day per year”. We also heard the origin story of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the site. I hadn’t realized what a pioneer and international pirate celebrity Chris was.

The biweekly Western Massachusetts Developers Meeting was small tonight, but still high-quality. Topics in our typically rambling discussion included:

• Are crawlers from some search engines following links embedded in Javascript (i.e. Ajax) code? And if so, what’s the use?
• What should Chas use for a CMS? (I don’t think any conclusion was reached; the two leading contenders seem be “build it in Django” or “just use Drupal”.) I do appreciate the argument that sometimes it’s good to think of yourself as a regular ol’ “business user” rather than someone who custom-develops everything just because he can.
• When does testing happen in your process? A range of answers here, from “before I write code” to, well, a bit later in the process.
• XPath and XQuery are worth knowing if you touch XML
• Various WTFs, including the company that replaced their SQL database with a single gigantic XML file because XML was, you know, magic.
• Google searches that find embarrassing mistakes. (It’s been a while since I updated that page)
• Another round of olde tyme computer reminiscences, prompted by my “Home Computer Handbook” from 1978. (Chris knows EBCDIC!) Have you ever heard of SLIP, GPSS, or SIMSCRIPT?
• Another round of version-control appreciation (Subversion and svnmerge, Darcs, Mercurial)
• Is there any OS X web design application somewhere between Coda and GoLive or Dreamweaver? I.e., not bloated, but still pleasant to use for people who need some WYSIWYG editing (my students)?
• BBEdit: What’s still good about it? (Palettes for nontechnical users.) What’s bad about it? (Kitchen-sink approach to multiple language features.) Make no mistake, though, BBEdit was definitely cool back in the day.
• The scriptaculous Ajax in-place editor
• Will inaccessible (in the Section 508 sense) web pages become more widespread now that the argument against them is being reduced from “What about all the crappy browsers out there, and what about accessibility?” to “What about accessibility?”

We also agreed to try doing some lightning talks or similar short presentations at a future meeting. I think this could be very cool. Chris said he would volunteer to run the gong.

I was only there for about half of the latest Western Mass. Developer Group meeting, but here are some of the things we rambled on about. Someone else will have to fill the earlier bits.

• Haskell: Should you bother?

Often after one of our Western Mass. Developer Group meetings I want to make a list of things we talked about. This time I actually did it. This only includes stuff I talked about or was within earshot of – minus the top secret material that you can only know about if you show up in person.

• C# structures and their fans and detractors
• BASIC Computer Games, the book
• the Amiga and “guru meditation”. Amiga’s not dead! Again, yet.
• learning assembly language
• the glories of VMS
• help wanted, or at least lacking: Flash, QA, HTML/CSS production
• Making life with Subversion better with svnmerge.py
• Darcs again, plus Mercurial vs. Bazaar. Anything’s better than CVS.
• the glory of the REPL in Ruby and Python
• Free review copies of books for user groups like ours (nice find, Lou!)
• the iPhone – finished writing that Ajax-based Skype client yet?
• the OpenMoko phone (I can’t believe they quoted Andre Gide in a press release)
• Dell shipping policy: “That will take three weeks. OMG WE DID IT IN 8 DAYS DUDE IT’S A MIRACLE”
• MacMall shipping policy: “We’re shipping part of your order on time. Did we mention we don’t have the other part yet? The part with the computer in it?”
• Smalldog, trustworthy Mac merchants
• Drupal, community plumbing
• Trac, even Rails guys dig it
• What do people do with (or think of) your code after you leave your job?
• Crazy UFO photos making the rounds. (My favorite theory after checking the internets is that they are part of a viral marketing campaign for the new Transformers movie)

There was more. It would be neat to have a wiki page for each meeting where we could all dump notes. No pressure on our de facto webmaster implied! But I bet you could whip it up in Rails in, like, 90 seconds.