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Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

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Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#11

Post by dpritchett »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #9

Context: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... is/was reasonably well-known, and people have been speculating on which language he meant ever since [EDIT: see reply by dpritchett]. Steve Yegge doesn't quite come out and declare his preference, but... Sadly, he's not written anything on his blog in a while.

Yegge has since admitted that NBL was Javascript.

Clojure hits the sweet spot between Yegge's "JVM languages shall inherit the earth" rhetoric in the fabulous "Rhinos and Tigers" talk and his longstanding fondness for Lisp. Clojure will probably never eclipse JS in mindshare even if it is a wonderful language.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#12

Post by d0m »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #8
d0m wrote: post #7

Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date . So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book. But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you or…

You gave a significant chunk of their profit to Amazon; it would be nice if they still gave you the PDF (which is the bonus for ordering directly from them), but not doing so is just "not nice", not rage-worthy. If you really wanted it, you could have cancelled your Amazon order and placed your order with manning...

The thing is, on joyofclojure.com, it says:

"[...]The Joy of Clojure can now be pre-ordered, which gives you access to the entire book as a PDF now, plus other formats including the printed book once they're available."

Which is misleading because you only get the pdf if it get pre-ordered FROM MANNING.

And, yes, you are right that I give a part of their profit to amazon, but I still give them money.

Maybe you are right that it is just "not nice" and not rage-worthy. Still, I don't like the idea of a company being "not nice" to someone giving them money.

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#13

Post by niels »

JSig wrote: post #10

Attn MEAPs: I was notified this morning of the following: "We are pleased to announce that The Joy of Clojure is now complete! As a MEAP subscriber you can download your copy of the finished ebook right now! " I was starting to wonder if I was going to ever get a final copy.

I just requested a refund for MEAP for "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja", that I ordered almost three years ago. I didn't expect it to take that long...

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#14

Post by d0m »

d0m wrote: post #7

Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date . So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book. But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you or…

And a funny fact:

For both of my comments, the score keep oscillating from +5 to -4. Which doesn't talk a lot because, if it continues like that, at the end, I will probably only have ~1 which won't give any clues about the opinion on HN-users. (i.e. people don't care about it vs half agree / half disagree!)

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#15

Post by jdludlow »

niels wrote: post #13
JSig wrote: post #10

Attn MEAPs: I was notified this morning of the following: "We are pleased to announce that The Joy of Clojure is now complete! As a MEAP subscriber you can download your copy of the finished ebook right now! " I was starting to wonder if I was going to ever get a final copy.

I just requested a refund for MEAP for "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja", that I ordered almost three years ago. I didn't expect it to take that long...

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, I will state again that "Joy of Clojure" is a very good book. (I'm a Clojure newbie, so I can't judge its technical content, just that it is well written.) The Manning early-access program is highly disappointing. We got an update in August 2010, and then again on March 18, 2011. Nothing in between.

When I pre-order from PragProg they update their PDFs much more often, and I can see the evolution of the book.

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#16

Post by gtani »

4.2 on the Rant-o-meter. "fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass..." more Yegge yadda-yadda.

Not sure if i prefer "class-five tropical storm" or a fire hydrant book shoved up. But those fire hydrant books, say,

- Wampler / Payne's Scala book, or

- Cesarini /Thompson's Erlang book

- Syme/Granicz/Cisternino for F#

- (dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; dunno which are scheme/common Lisp fire hydrants, and ocaml doesn't have one)

are very important, not to read in their entirety, but to figure out where to find stuff when you're hauling yourself out of intermediate developer-ness i.e. get you up to understanding production code, and cover the edge cases so you can figure out the corner cases and save you asking hundreds of questions on stackoverflow. Somewhere in amazon i wrote a book review that tutorial books cover 1 sigmas of the language, standard libs and dev environment, but books that cover 2 sigmas are rare.

And this is that book for clojure. And clojure does have that "perfect storm" feel

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#17

Post by jdludlow »

myth_drannon wrote: post #5

English is not my first language but: "So nobody could be more surprised than I that a Lisp dialect ..." shouldn't it be "than ME"

The rule of thumb would be to fill in the implied verb and see which one makes sense.

"So nobody could be more surprised than I was that a Lisp dialect ..."

"So nobody could be more surprised than me was that a Lisp dialect ..."

Then it becomes clear that "I" is correct.

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#18

Post by gtani »

d0m wrote: post #7

Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date . So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book. But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you or…

If you get on Manning's email list, you'll get a steady stream of discount codes and never have to spend full price.

Re: Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

#19

Post by claesh »

jdludlow wrote: post #15
niels wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just requested a refund for MEAP for "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja", that I ordered almost three years ago. I didn't expect it to take that long...

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, I will state again that "Joy of Clojure" is a very good book. (I'm a Clojure newbie, so I can't judge its technical content, just that it is well written.) The Manning early-access program is highly disappointing. We got an update in August 2010, and then again on March 18, 2011. Nothing in between. When I pre-order from PragProg they update their PDFs much…

I just downloaded the finished ebook. Searching for "monad" returns three hits. :lemonad, one mention to monadic and one mention of monads in the source list. I was a little disappointed.
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