Welcome to Cardigan Bay

Cardigan Bay is my new wiki-engine written in Clojure / ClojureScript. I’ve been working on it for about three months, and it’s a long way from finished, but now interesting enough for people to start playing with (and hopefully giving me some feedback on). The goal is for this to be the new engine behind …

Travel Report

So as noted previously, I went travelling without a notebook, but with a Xaomi tablet, a portable keyboard, and a copy of UserLand Linux. How did that go? Surprisingly well. Actually I ended up using another keyboard, a cheap “cover” with keyboard built in, no Bluetooth but micro-USB. And I had to get an adaptor …

Holiday Reading

I’m about to go on holiday in January. And it’s time for a new adventure in travelling without my laptop. I can’t go anywhere without the safety blanket of a Unix computer. And since my PocketCHIP got stolen, I’ve been without something portable. Anyway, what you see in the photo is my new Xaomi 8″ …

How would you design the perfect programming language?

Another Quora answer I should be moving here : Phil Jones’s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language?   Well, the obvious way you’d approach it, is start with a reasonable knowledge of using other languages to get a sense for their strengths and weaknesses. And start with some good role models. …

Which language is better for creating DSLs, Clojure or Haskell?

Another Quora answer. Part of my increasing admiration for the virtues of EDN in Clojure. Which language is better for creating DSLs, Clojure or Haskell? Clojure has a slightly different philosophy than most Lisps, I think. In Clojure you’d be more likely to make your “DSL” in EDN (“Extensible Data Notation”, which is a bit …

A Replacement for PHP

I asked Quora for ideas for how a replacement PHP might look. On the whole people are not enthusiastic. Alexander Tchitchigin had an interesting answer, but which focused on the basic theme of “once we move away from PHP’s weaknesses, we might as well use any language. Which prompted me to write this comment elaborating …

August is Patterning Month

August is Patterning month again. I’m back to work on the Patterning library. And, in particular, getting it working properly in the ClojureScript, in-browser version. I’m going to be using devcards, figwheel, spec and other good tools in the Clojure community. I’ll be revamping the site and new versions of the code. Watch this space …

Languages for 2018

Bit early. But I answered a question on Quora about languages to learn for 2018. Here’s what’s interesting me for 2018 : I want to continue getting more experienced and better with Clojure. No language is perfect, but for me Clojure is the best language I’ve ever used. And I want to use it for …