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Simple Made Easy (2011)

infoq.com

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Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#21

Post by chowells »

nailer wrote: post #11

One thing I've found super helpful on my current project (which happens to be node) is using OSS concepts and npm as a unit of modularity. Eg, everything is just a grab bag of functions in an npm module (sometimes with a closure holding some state - I either reject or don't understand FP people when they claim FP doesn't have state). Each module has tests, dependencies, a README, and if it is reusable by other projec…

FP people have never claimed they don't have state. That's a straw man used to argue against something no one is saying.

The claim is that there is no hidden state - everything is made explicit.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#22

Post by swah »

rlander wrote: post #15
swah wrote: post #7

At some point it felt like Clojure was the future, the new thing, so amazingly better - was that just a feeling of novelty? Or something went wrong with its use case? Of course, these days its about Rust, Swift and LLVM, but it doesn't have those lispy properties we love...

I felt like that, like Clojure was the future, around 2009/2010. But then Java libraries and their impossible stack traces got in the way. I've been waiting for a native Clojure implementation (or on top of Python or the Erlang VM) ever since.

Yep, I'd love something like Clojure with an implementation/tooling like Go's.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#23

Post by steinuil »

nailer wrote: post #11

One thing I've found super helpful on my current project (which happens to be node) is using OSS concepts and npm as a unit of modularity. Eg, everything is just a grab bag of functions in an npm module (sometimes with a closure holding some state - I either reject or don't understand FP people when they claim FP doesn't have state). Each module has tests, dependencies, a README, and if it is reusable by other projec…

> I either reject or don't understand FP people when they claim FP doesn't have state).

But that's not what state is, closures are just an easier way to define lots of functions with similar parts.

EDIT: Sure, you can call "whether or not f() or x are defined at the moment of calling (y) => f(x, y);" a form of "state", but this is called late binding and is simply not a thing in purely functional languages like Haskell; the existence of f() and x is checked at compile time.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#24

Post by rch »

amelius wrote: post #6
corysama wrote: post #4

Simple Made Easy is a great introduction to the Rich Hickey Fanclub [1] ;) Other recommendations for early viewing are "Hammock Driven Development", "The Value of Values" and "The Design of Datomic". [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

Hickey may be a brilliant software architect, but I'm wondering how high he ranks as a business leader. How is his company Datomic doing? Also in the light of the new database service Cloud Spanner just launched by Google.

Anecdotal, but I've run into a couple of companies currently using Datomic in analytics and ML (with Clojure).

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#25

Post by mdgart »

nailer wrote: post #11

One thing I've found super helpful on my current project (which happens to be node) is using OSS concepts and npm as a unit of modularity. Eg, everything is just a grab bag of functions in an npm module (sometimes with a closure holding some state - I either reject or don't understand FP people when they claim FP doesn't have state). Each module has tests, dependencies, a README, and if it is reusable by other projec…

"I either reject or don't understand FP people when they claim FP doesn't have state" FP has state, but it makes it explicit avoiding side effects inside functions and using persistent data structures, that means, instead of mutating the state you create a new state. Without state basically any program is totally useless.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#26

Post by mh8h »

amelius wrote: post #6
corysama wrote: post #4

Simple Made Easy is a great introduction to the Rich Hickey Fanclub [1] ;) Other recommendations for early viewing are "Hammock Driven Development", "The Value of Values" and "The Design of Datomic". [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

Hickey may be a brilliant software architect, but I'm wondering how high he ranks as a business leader. How is his company Datomic doing? Also in the light of the new database service Cloud Spanner just launched by Google.

Datomic is very different from the typical database in terms of the operations it supports. I don't think Google Spanner, or the other similar products, are direct competitors.

I don't know much about how they are doing financially though.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#28

Post by branchly2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #17
rlander wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like that, like Clojure was the future, around 2009/2010. But then Java libraries and their impossible stack traces got in the way. I've been waiting for a native Clojure implementation (or on top of Python or the Erlang VM) ever since.

There are few abandoned attempts. Writing from scratch those Java libraries, including a good quality AOT compiler and GC is not something to do as hobby on the weekends.

Don't need all those Java libraries if you've got good FFI with C libraries.

Don't need AOT compilation; if you want performance, just stick with regular Clojure on the JVM.

I'd love to just see a small general-purpose interpreted Clojure (quick start up, small memory footprint, easy access to C libs), even if it lacked concurrency features.

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#29

Post by pmarreck »

corysama wrote: post #4

Simple Made Easy is a great introduction to the Rich Hickey Fanclub [1] ;) Other recommendations for early viewing are "Hammock Driven Development", "The Value of Values" and "The Design of Datomic". [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

You forgot "Are We There Yet?", which blew my mind at the time ("with respect to other code, mutability is an immutable function with a hidden time argument") and which was MY introduction to this fanclub.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

Re: Simple Made Easy (2011)

#30

Post by pmarreck »

amelius wrote: post #6
corysama wrote: post #4

Simple Made Easy is a great introduction to the Rich Hickey Fanclub [1] ;) Other recommendations for early viewing are "Hammock Driven Development", "The Value of Values" and "The Design of Datomic". [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

Hickey may be a brilliant software architect, but I'm wondering how high he ranks as a business leader. How is his company Datomic doing? Also in the light of the new database service Cloud Spanner just launched by Google.

I would love to know how using Datomic is vs. rolling your own data-immutability solution via other mechanisms but using off-the-shelf SQL/big-data tools.
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