Clojure Hack Night Monday, in Reston

The Capital Area Clojure Users’ Group is hosting an evening of collaborative Clojure coding next Monday, August 2, at 6PM, at Near Infinity, in Reston. Details are available at the group’s meetup page.

Some very experienced people will be on hand, as well as newcomers. We’ll spend some time at the beginning answering questions and helping people with their setups as necessary. (Emacs FTW!) Then it’s on to pair programming. Possible coding projects are listed on the group’s meetup page. More ideas are welcome. There’s a lot of open source Clojure code that needs writing.

Please be sure to sign up through meetup if you’d like to come: spaces are limited.

Announcing Vijual, a graph layout tool

Group member Conrad Barski has just released version 0.1.0 of Vijual, a graph layout engine written in Clojure. Check Conrad’s detailed announcement for lots of information about installation and use. One detail that caught my eye is the use of the leiningen build tool and clojars community repository to package and distribute Vijual. This looks like an emerging standard.

The Joy of Michael Fogus

Here are two pieces of information related to group member Michael Fogus. First, he will be speaking later today, January 14, at FGM in Reston, on the subject of Clojure 1.1 features. More info is at the Capital Area Clojure Users Group meetup site. Second, the book he is co-authoring with Chris Houser, The Joy of Clojure, is available for pre-ordering, and when you pre-order you may read the book as it progresses.

Congratulations, fogus!

Clojure at DC’s ALT.NET, January 27, 7PM

Group member Craig Andera is speaking about Clojure at this month’s ALT.NET meeting. It’s being held at the Motley Fool’s offices in Alexandria, 5 minutes from the Metro stop, on Wednesday, January 27, at 7pm.

Sign up here (it’s free): http://www.eventbrite.com/event/528348304

From the event’s description:

So, what is Clojure?

C# has been adding exciting new features with every release, but many of these have been available in other languages for years or even decades. By examining some of the features of these other languages, we can hope to glean what’s in store for the future of C#. Clojure is a JVM-based Lisp with an integral and interesting approach to concurrency. In this talk, we’ll examine those features, after a brief introduction to Clojure syntax.

Who is Craig?

Craig Andera … is an independent consultant with Wangdera Corporation, where he holds the rank of Jedi Master. He focuses on the design and implementation of large-scale, web-based systems.

Clojure Convinces Tim Bray to Code in a LISP

I was catching up on unread RSS feeds this morning, and I came across these two posts, from earlier in the month, in which superblogger Tim Bray, who has repeatedly sworn he would never program in any LISP, talks about programming a Clojure version of his wide-finder parallel-programming challenge project. His posts are here:

1. Concur.next — References
2. Concur.next — Parallel I/O

I recommend taking a close look at both posts. Bray is a clear thinker and excellent writer, so his code and explanations are not hard to follow. Also, the posts are worthwhile for the helpful “you are doing it wrong” comments posted below. It shows what a strong and helpful community Clojure has.

Clojure training in Reston, with Rich and Stu, next year

Thanks to Paul for pointing this out: the Pragmatic Programmers training series is offering a 3-day training course in Reston, VA next year (date TBD). Clojure’s creator Rich Hickey and Stuart Halloway will be instructing. More information is at the Pragmatic Programmers site.

It looks like the course will assume you know something about Lisp or Java and functional programming, and possibly concurrency, but nothing about Clojure. It’s going to go well beyond basics, though, and it’s a chance to ask Rick Hickey questions directly.

It’s going to be expensive, with the alumni/group discount rate still a hefty $1195. The early bird price is $1495. I’ve been to the Advanced Ruby course of the same dimensions and cost, and it was worth it. If you all want to join up, 3 or more of us can get the group rate and save a few hundred dollars each.

Clojure 1.0 and git

I’m chipping away at my Mashup project tasks, namely an OAuth library for Twitter and other providers of protected resources. But I wanted to pass on a concrete contribution, so here are some tips about taking advantage of Clojure’s availability through git, and how to put your clojure-contrib library in sync with the big Clojure 1.0 release.

Date management for the mashup project

I’m posting the code I’ve written for date management in the mashup project. It’s just a sketch, really. There’s plenty of work to do to fill it out. But I wanted to post what I’ve got now.

A bit of Clojure at RubyNation 2009

Just a quick post to mention how Clojure was mentioned at the RubyNation conference in Reston last weekend.

I gave a lightning talk on day 2. Slides are posted. I only had 6 minutes, so I kept it brief. I don’t think I convinced a lot of the audience members to try it out. Afterwards, though, I got to talk to Aaron Bedra of Relevance, who was a technical editor for Stu’s book. He reports Clojure is actually in use on commercial projects. He’s a swell fellow.

Russ Olsen gave an impromptu talk at the end of the day about Clojure, Scala, Erlang, and Reia. Two things struck me about his approach to new languages. First, he gives a lot of important to “curb appeal”, or how nice the code looks. The parentheses bother him about Clojure and other lisps, same old story. The second thing, though, is the importance given to metaprogramming, which Ruby has brought into the forefront of a lot of developers’ minds. As Russ pointed out, any Lisp makes metaprogramming easy. So that may be a selling point for Clojure among Rubyists.

Coding Meeting May 16th 1pm at HacDC

We’re meeting face-to-face again on Saturday, May 16th at 1pm, at HacDC’s meeting space in DC. We’ll be meeting to hack some code on our mashup project. Check out the group’s google group for discussion and code produced so far.