found_drama

In the realm of technical, programming-related, computer science-type books, The Joy of Clojure is a bit of an oddity. And this is a very good thing.

WHAT THE BOOK IS NOT: The Joy of Clojure is not a beginner’s introduction to the language. The Joy of Clojure is not a glorified appendix of methods and syntax. The Joy of Clojure is not a “cookbook” or a “how-to” or an “FAQ”. The Joy of Clojure is not an explanation on how to shoe-horn your Java code into (some (graceful [parenthetical syntax])). The Joy of Clojure is not a dry or sterile technical manual.

WHAT THE BOOK IS: The Joy of Clojure is as much a philosophical text as it is a survey of the language. The Joy of Clojure embraces the language’s own flexible nature and describes itself in that way. The Joy of Clojure has a sense of humor. The Joy of Clojure expects a little work from you (but is willing to lend a hand along the way). The Joy of Clojure respects the baggage that you bring from your other programming languages, but expects you to check those bags at the door. The Joy of Clojure wants to make you a better programmer, not a Clojure programmer.

Rating? ★★★★☆

So… why 4-stars? I seldom give out 5-star reviews—I reserve those for books that completely blow my mind. While this one was a real eye-opener, my lid did not pop fully and totally off. Why not? Partly because I’m coming into Clojure as an outsider. It isn’t a book for Clojure beginners—you could be a Clojure novice and get a lot out of this book, but I believe you would need a little more background in Lisp^[1]. How to get that 5th star…? A “chapter 0″ for the complete novice? or maybe an appendix that can help that novice wade through some of the more esoteric-feeling elements of the language.—i.e., folks such as myself that are unfamiliar with Clojure (and/or Lisp in a more general sense^[2]) may find the language’s syntax a bit… opaque? oblique? There’s a learning curve with every language, I suppose but there are certain things in Clojure that look FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG to someone accustomed to a language like JavaScript or Java. The onus is (of course) on the reader to embrace these things (i.e., “Who is the one that opened the book and wanted to learn something new?”) but it’s sometimes easy to get lost in these little details.

I would absolutely recommend this to anyone I know that had an interest in Clojure and/or functional programming.

1. Lisp’s syntax can be a bit off-putting to outsiders and novices… and the authors even come out and say this in the book. [↩]
2. Viz., I haven’t looked at/used Lisp in probably… 10 years? [↩]

“What took you so long to pick it up?”

I did not believe the hype.

Before The Windup Girl, my exposure to Bacigalupi’s work was through two short stories:

1. “The People of Sand and Slag”—which seemed to pop-up everywhere^[1] for a while; and then
2. “Yellow Card Man”—which was in the same milieu as this novel and which I liked but which I didn’t really “get” because I was expecting something more along the lines of “The People of Sand and Slag”.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy Bacigalupi’s work at least on some level—they were both good stories^[2] but neither of them was enough to send me out on a mission looking to read more of his work. Nevertheless, I recognized the name^[3] and had this strong flicker of recognition every time yet another review appeared in my RSS reader. The Windup Girl is amazing and a shoe-in for at least one of 2009′s big awards and so forth. But I kept thinking about “The People of Sand and Slag”.

Turns out that Bacigalupi has the same problem that I have^[4].

His ideas are big. Too big for some crummy 5,000 word short story or some 8,500 word novelette. Those ideas are big and they are important and they need room to breathe. Those ideas need a 350+ page apparatus to fully get themselves across. But these big ideas all seem so small and slow at first, and for the first 50-100 pages you find yourself thinking So what? So this is an interesting and immersive milieu but where’s the action? Why is everyone ready to have this book’s babies? But then it hits you hard and drags you through 250 more stunning pages^[5].

I loved this book the way that I loved Ian McDonald’s River of Gods^[6]. There is something very special about the rich tapestry that these guys have created by putting these futuristic settings against the lush and visceral backdrops of these oriental locales with all their poverty and banalia. But whereas McDonald did it with AIs in India, Bacigalupi is doing it with genetically modified human not-quite-clones in Thailand.

But what makes this one so special is that everyone is under indictment and nothing is sacrosanct. None of the stories end the way you would want them to, but you cannot think of any other way that they could end. This is one that will haunt you, and makes a great companion read for Oryx and Crake.

1. Previously reviewed here. [↩]
2. ”Yellow Card Man” was a particularly fine gem, though my re-read-to-really-get-it is still pending. [↩]
3. Perhaps it helps that “Bacigalupi” is an epic handle. [↩]
4. Alternatively: “Turns out that Bacigalupi has the same problem that I would like to think that I have.” [↩]
5. But now I’m just gushing? [↩]
6. Previously reviewed here. [↩]

• The complete guide to creating widgets in WordPress 2.8
  (tagged: todo WordPress widgets PHP plugin )
• FeedWordPress
  "simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress"
  (tagged: wordpress plugin Tumblr aggregator )
• Starkers
  "The completely naked theme for WordPress"
  (tagged: wordpress )
• Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large
  by Alex Payne (via @fogus)
  

  Moving forward just means spending several minutes thinking about your problem and picking an implementation technology with slightly better performance characteristics than whatever you were using before. ¶ This is where I believe Node fits in.

  (tagged: Node.js scalability javascript todo )
• An interview with Ian McDonald
  Great interview, great discussion.
  (tagged: interview interesting writing scifi )

It’s the little things that matter the most sometimes.

Without Chewbacca’s help, we never would have won the war.

Without Chewbacca’s help, we never would have won the war.

…but I’d feel remiss for not saying anything at all.

I first caught wind of Google’s JSConf.eu scholarships-for-females program in a roundabout way. I had just started following Rebecca Murphey’s posts^[1] when I saw this tweet.

At first I thought very little of it but after seeing Nicole Sullivan’s and then Murphey’s more in-depth posts, I followed through to the rest of the thread.

1. Personally, I’m strongly in the camp the Google is doing the right thing with these scholarships. These sorts of scholarships exist all over the place, targeting all kinds of specific groups. If we^[2] are going to grow as a community, we need a broad range of voices. Sometimes the best way to get those voices is to give them a boost on the way up.
2. I feel like this thread of discourse comes up at least once a year. Every time that it comes up and someone cites that we are far from a 50/50-male/female mix in our professional community, I think “there must be some perfectly logical explanation for this” and almost always, when you look at it logically, the sad truth is that sexist pressures drive women out. I don’t know what is going to change this, but it needs to change.
3. To the women that have spoken up about this; to the men that have come to their support; to Google for inadvertently starting this year’s furor: thank you.

The politics of this subject are complicated and subtle; that doesn’t help. But we can help ourselves to make this a vibrant and productive community by speaking out and speaking up—even if it’s just in some small way^[3].

1. In a bit of an ironic twist? What with this women-in-tech thread getting going at around the same time that I start following the blogs/posts of several women developers. [↩]
2. ”We” here being web developers; but really “we” could be “any community”. [↩]
3. It’s a start, eh? [↩]