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Meeting Notes 2012-04-24

Table of Contents

Field Trip: Introduction to Clojure with Philly Lambda

  • The semester is ending.
    • Jon: Get some closure with Clojure!
  • The talk is well-attended, proving that Facebook event attendance lists don't mean anything.
  • Michael was worried that everyone would already knew Lisp.
    • Rafe: I just came here to make fun of Lisp and talk about ML.
  • Hunter: Why are there so many emacs people here?
  • Michael goes over some of the objections people have to Lisps, such as "looks funny" and "all the round braces are in weird spots."
  • SLIME: Connected. Take this REPL, brother, and may it serve you well.
    • Swanky.
  • Michael attempts to evaluate 1 as a function.
    • Michael: It throws that exception in your face.
  • Michael: If anyone's interested in the Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2 depate…
  • Michael: Commas are whitespace. You could actually put twelve of them in there.
  • Hunter thinks that putting commas in maps is not idiomatic, and so does not do that. Michael thinks putting commas in maps actually is idiomatic, but nevertheless also does not do that.
  • Much of Michael's example code uses :foo, :bar, :baz, :quz, etc.
    • Michael: I should probably get some more concrete examples in here.
    • Andrew proposes :booze as a new metasyntactic variable.
  • Michael: This is terrible. I'm going to rewrite this to not be terrible.
  • Eclipse gets really unhappy about mismatched quotes.
  • Everything that isn't nil or false is true. Including 0.
    • Mish: Nooooo……
  • Michael eyeballs the right number of parentheses to copy, while mumbling.
  • Mish: Why does it return Java exceptions? Isn't that not useful?
    • Hunter: You can learn to read them.
    • Alternately, you can always just copy paste the errors to StackOverflow.
  • Michael: Once you have this, boilerplate code makes you want to kill kittens.
  • There's some macro metaprogramming magic.
    • Michael: There's a word "homoiconic," which I've never heard strictly defined, but it means something like that.
  • Hunter: Clojure has a lot of syntax. Traditional Lisp people hate that. I'm coming from the Perl world, so I love it.
  • Michael: Eclipse just did something terrible.
    • Eclipse does something terrible, again.
      • Eclipse does something terrible, again, again.
        • Michael: Well, Eclipse sucks.
        • Mish: Why don't we use emacs?
    • Eclipse spits out a GUID.
      • Michael: Session error, huh?
      • Andrew: NullPointerException!

Author: Matthew Croop

Date: 2012-11-14 17:49:53 EST

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