Clojure Weekly, Oct 1st, 2015
Welcome to another issue of Clojure Weekly! Here I collect a few links, normally 4/5 urls, pointing at articles, docs, screencasts, podcasts and anything else that attracts my attention in the clojure-sphere for the last 7 (or so) days. I add a small comment so you can decide if you want to look at the whole thing or not. That’s it, enjoy!
Clojure eXchange 2015 - Call for Papers The Clojure eXchange call for papers is open in case you'missed the news. This year's two days conference in London also adopts shorter talks (25 mins), making room for many more speakers. Submit your talk now, the CFP closes October 25th.
apply - clojure.core apply, in the most frequent form, takes a function and a list and returns the result of invoking the function using the content of the list as the parameters to the function. apply is useful in all those cases where the parameters of a function are generated dynamically as part of the computation and are not known at the time of writing the program. In Lisp history apply is also the entry point of the first Lisp interpreter (just before invoking eval recursively, the famous eval-apply meta-circular interpreter). So it's more than just a function, is a piece of history :)
Strange Loop - YouTube The videos from StrangeLoop are already available. There are many many interesting talks and I am going through them on my spare time. Based on the number of views, this is what you should not miss: "Propositions as Types" by Philip Wadler, "Transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities" by Martin Kleppmann, "Elm in Production" by Richard Feldman, "I See What You Mean" by Peter Alvaro", A History of Programming Languages for 2 Voices" by David Nolen and Michael Bernstein and many more.
cbaggers/tamei Tamei takes the whole lot of common lisp symbols and splits them into categories based on increased "impurity". It's an interesting classification and I'd be interested to see how it reflects on Clojure. Clojure aims at being more pure than CL but there are side effecting forms in Clojure too. I'm thinking defeinitely at something like (println) or (spit) doing IO stuff, but also more subtle forms like (throw).
MaiaVictor/caramel Caramel is a DSL on top of lambda calculus. Despite being complete and interesting, lambda calculus is not something you'd like to type on a daily basis because it's quite verbose (think church numerals for example!). Caramel is written in Haskell but the DSL it implements is quite lispy. What can you do with this? One interesting application is to see how some expression would look like in the corresponding lambda calculus (although that is very likely for academic purposes).
EMBL Job Opportunities - EMBL Not usually posting about jobs here, but this one seemed worth mentioning. The European Bioinformatics Institute is searching Clojure devs (not just Clojure, but read the ads), to work on genetics research in the Cambridge lab. They're implementing a graph-based data model on top of Datomic and the API layer around that. I'm very happy to see how many fields Clojure is serving nowadays.
