Kotka

Did you know about some?

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:33:00 +0200

Every once in a while someone asks on the Clojure group why (contains? [:a :b :c] :a) returns false. In the following heated discussions about semantics (yeah! a discussion about semantics!) people always suggest to add a linear-search to Clojure. What they miss: linear-search is already there.

Should we prefer dynamic behaviour?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:39:00 +0200

Clojure is a dynamic programming language. This is a huge plus in my opinion. It really makes fast development easy. Especially when fishing in troubled waters for a rapid prototype (or when you are a lone fighter).

However dynamic behaviour usually comes at a runtime cost. Clojure provides several means to gain speed at cost of its dynamic nature. One example are type hints. Another – not so obvious – example are inline definitions of protocol functions in a defrecord. What are the trade-offs? And what should be the default?

Did you know about the importance of being first?

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:45:00 +0200

Last week, I had the chance of attending the Clojure dojo at the Thoughtworks office in London. It was great to see so many people enjoying to work with Clojure. Unfortunately chances are rather low to put up something similar here in the Rhein-Main region. sigh

However, what I really want to talk about is a question which arose during the dojo. In fact this question has been raised several times and I think it can't hurt to shed some more light on this issue: „How to order the arguments of your functions?“

Did you know about version numbers?

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:36:00 +0200

In our todays installment of my little „Did you know“-series we won't look at Clojure itself but an important infrastructure topic.

The Clojure ecosystem is growing steadily. New libraries spawn every day. This is a Good Thing™. Tools like maven, gradle, leiningen and ivy make life easier for the developer who intends to use these new libraries. However library developers should pay attention to some details.

ClojureCheck is back!

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:28:00 +0200

ClojureCheck is back. It brings specification based testing to Clojure and integrates (almost) seamless with clojure.test. So what does specification based testing mean and how does it help you?