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SICP in Clojure

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Re: SICP in Clojure

#11

Post by jahnu »

neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

A lot of that feeling, at least for some of us, comes from jobs which require us to implement lots of business logic.

Business logic often requires coding lots of small conditions distributed all over the code base of an application. Especially once you hit the maintenance phase.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#12

Post by sbensu »

To the author: on the compound data structures example, it would be much better to return an anonymous function with `fn` than to use `defn`. `defn` is meant to add global definitions to the namespace, not to be used as a value.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#13

Post by edem »

sbensu wrote: post #12

To the author: on the compound data structures example, it would be much better to return an anonymous function with `fn` than to use `defn`. `defn` is meant to add global definitions to the namespace, not to be used as a value.

This was confusing to me as well since in the Scheme examples they embed functions into each other with define. It may be useful to use letfn to achieve something similar.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#14

Post by 59nadir »

taeric wrote: post #6
neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

Swiss clocks feel impressive, no doubt. Quartz clocks, though, have the advantage of being accurate.

This has absolutely no relevance to the analogy.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#15

Post by kwhitefoot »

neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

You can write in functional style in pretty much any language. It might not look quite so pretty but it can come close. And it can often be usably efficient too.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#16

Post by dagw »

taeric wrote: post #6
neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

Swiss clocks feel impressive, no doubt. Quartz clocks, though, have the advantage of being accurate.

A lot of Swiss watches (even from the most high end brands) use quartz movements.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#17

Post by babo »

neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

Check some Python code from Peter Norvig and you will see a beautiful and clever style. It's not the language which stops you.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#18

Post by dkersten »

neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

This is sort of how I feel after moving from over a year of pure Clojure(script) development, to working with Python again. Its not that you can't write beautiful code in Python, its just that the language encourages a certain style.

Re: SICP in Clojure

#19

Post by adamc »

neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

I dunno. I spent some time learning Clojure but came to the conclusion that it's really only a good tool if you are also heavily committed to Java -- too many Java stack traces, too many functions where the answer is "use Java", too much time looking at Java source code. I don't hate Java, but that wasn't what I was hoping for. (Haskell is a different story, very different pros and cons.)

Re: SICP in Clojure

#20

Post by yati »

babo wrote: post #17
neoncontrails wrote: post #4

I've been feeling the past few weeks the repeated impact of hitting a wall. Programming was starting to feel like grinding. I felt wistful for SICP, when programming was full of big ideas and elegant new approaches to problems my unprincipled brain's first instinct was to clobber by brute force -- and learned, quickly, in Scheme, it's hard to be artless. It is, I think, harder code gracelessly in Scheme than to code…

Check some Python code from Peter Norvig and you will see a beautiful and clever style. It's not the language which stops you.

While I've learned a lot from Norvig's posts, he tends to write Python code that many wouldn't consider "Pythonic" :)
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