People who use Parinfer rather than Paredit when learning Clojure really like it. The concept is available in the Clojure mode in all the usual suspects of IDEs (IntelliJ Cursive, emacs Cider, etc.)
The size of the community is not as important as the value of what is available. It's just not widely known, or maybe there's still much potential yet unrealized.
This is an oldie but a goodie on how interactive an experience you can have when using Clojure on the front end and backend of a web app:
This project is the most recent and most promising iteration of someone making a very visual interactive tool for introspecting on data structures in the REPL environment
The simplicity of the visual language that Scratch provides inherits from the simplicity of Lisp, via Logo. The Logo language (& the Mindstorms pedagogical philosophy), which is what Scratch builds off of in a visual way, was implemented as a dialect of Lisp.
From anecdotal experience, I do believe that the choice of a Lisp for Logo was an important criterion in the simplicity of the language, and thus the high impact of the learning impact.
I do think that if we find Scratch useful and powerful, then we should really re-/consider Clojure as an important language for real general purpose programming work, for many reasons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-53JoGPE4
You seemed to have misunderstood what I was saying.
I was pointing out that specifically in the case of chili spice, I don't think it's good for the body. There are data to support the idea that eating large amounts of capsaicin is harmful to the body:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/chili-peppers#dow...
Meanwhile, go to the vitamin supplement section of your nearest store, look at the ingredients of turmeric tablets, and you'll see they have a disclaimer that they have trace amounts of black pepper to magnify the effect of turmeric.
Everything else you said is fine by me because I wasn't arguing for it or against it.
Oranges and millets probably came from China, bananas probably came from SE Asia (and these things probably before the Sangam age, which is before the Pallavas and the height of the Cholas, so clearly exchange was happening for longer than we know).
A slight correction to what you said, idli came from a Pallava king in the 13th century who married a bride from a Indonesia who in turn brought along cooks who liked using rice. They combined rice with lentils to make idli:
https://youtu.be/7pxEXHxSQzU
To be clear, I know that rice has been grown in South Asia since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (>= 4500 years ago), but all I'm saying is specifically about idli.
The thing about chili peppers is that they're not healthy (have medicinal benefits) in the way peppercorn and long pepper do. Capsaicin can be harmful in large quantities, IIUC.
There are South Indian foods and snacks like venpongal and methu vadai that use whole peppercorn, not chili peppers. Tomato is another colonialism byproduct, but there are still people who make versions that use lemons instead of tomatoes. A common homemade drink for sick people is made from grinding dried ginger, coriander seeds, and black pepper. These are all daily foods. But you're right, few households or restaurants are 100% free of these 400 year old import crops.
Obviously, chili pepper is used where peppercorn or ground black pepper used to be, for the reasons in the parent comment. It also makes sense that black pepper would have been used in various dishes because it enhances the potency of the medicinal properties of turmeric by an order of magnitude. It wouldn't be hard to go back to black pepper, I imagine, with a little retooling of recipes to rebalance flavors.
To add to that and concur that Rich generally doesn't have such un-nuanced strong opinions without context, see his talk Effective Programs. He explains what Clojure is good for and isn't good for, and says more clearly it so depends on what you're doing.
He doesn't organize the Clojure conferences, but I'd imagine that if he didn't see any value in any context for static typing, there wouldn't have been a talk about Typed Racket and static typing researchers as keynote speakers, etc.
And FWIW, spec is a library trying to come as close as possible to the imaginary midpoint of static and dynamic typing, but in a Clojure-y way.
I agree with the grandparent comment. The parent comment sounds like a random and non representative sampling of what makes Clojure unique.
Both parent and grandparent correctly identify that many Clojure ideas come from elsewhere. Lisp and hosting on the JVM were not new. Immutability and persistent data structures weren't new ideas.
But putting them into one and making it performant was a paper published by people in the Clojure community (Rich was the lead author).
Clojure describes itself as data-oriented. That means not just the primacy of data, but of plain data, unadorned: https://youtu.be/VSdnJDO-xdg
What I find almost unique Clojure is that there's a philosophy to it that resonates throughout in it's design decisions: simplicity. Data is simpler than code, and code is simpler than macros, so prefer data and leave macros so a last resort. Libraries are simple, frameworks are complex. Plain data is simple, and the knock on effects of every library converting to & from plain data is powerful. But it only reveals itself after using Clojure for a while. Immutability allows for simpler code that you can reason about. Isolating state into containers allows you to characterize, control, and reduce touch points with state, which is necessary yet a source of complexity.
You can see the same set of ideas that underpin the design of Clojure to be present in follow on library additions (reducers/transducers, async, Datomic, etc). There's simplicity, often manifested in immutability and the associative model of information (everything is a map), at least.
Although I started the above project around the same time as Ramsey started his project in the original link (CLisp in Arabic), they were two entirely independent things. Ramsey's project is a 100% translation, whereas my project scales to other natural languages but is not a 100% translation.
Tim and I worked on trying to make programming in other languages easier as a means to help more kids learn programming, and learn FP the Lisp way, which we explain as more natural.
Same here, can you let me know, too? I'm just an idle observer, more often interested in consuming the polished findings, but am utterly fascinated and impressed by the work required to get there.
Can you also comment on how the current decipherments are going? And how much progress has been made in the Dravido-Elamite angle?
This book came out that republishes incomplete research that establishes cognates and place name parallels, although no grammatical connections made. In light of the progress made in the IVC script, it seems compelling.
https://tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=38813
In the meantime since this article was published in 2013, for IVC in terms of a Dravidian language, there's been a lot of progress in terms of script decipherment (to the point where the theory has become proof), archaeology, and DNA analysis that support each other consistently.
>“We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”
And this, too, which says lynching is a natural individual reaction to systemic failure of law and order:
>And where people do not feel they can rely on the police or courts to keep them safe, research shows, panic over a perceived threat can lead some to take matters into their own hands — to lynch.
As tempting as it is to believe this story's premise that Facebook is bullying?/neglecting? smaller countries and then fit that into the larger backlash against social media, I think it's very misleading to believe that actually applies in Sri Lanka's case.
In fact, Sri Lanka has a history of majoritarian ethnic violence, up to and including genocide, against ethnic nationalities and minorities within the country.
Sinhalese also committed organized violence against Muslims in 1915. There were riots in 1958 because Tamils protested the use of the Sinhalese on license plates (following 1956 when Sinhalese replaced English as the only official language of govt, disenfrachising all Tamil govt employees). Tamils were killed in 1974 at the international Tamil conference in Jaffna, the Tamil cultural capital. And of course, the official war between 1983 - 2009 was one drawn-out genocide against Tamils by the 99% Sinhalese military and 95% Sinhalese police force, "ignited" by Sinhalese "mobs" using govt voter lists to burn Tamil homes and business along with killing Tamils, while the police were deployed everywhere but stood by and watched.
I get the tech-relevance of Facebook here, but this story is trying to take the latest ethnic atrocity from country that's already systemically racist, and somehow shoehorn it into the larger narrative of social media, corruption, and politics.
Maybe this is Sri Lanka's attempt at distancing itself from the Cambridge Analytica exposé that Channel 4 did undercover, where they posed as a middleman working to swing the recent SL local elections in the favor of an opposition chauvinist strongman who oversaw the crescendo of genocide against Tamils in 2009 (https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-...)
I find the Sri Lankan government a very unsympathetic, persistent, complicit actor in the violence within its borders. It's not like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were around to cause all the racist violence since 1915.
The CLJS-macro story is still a little tricky -- CLJS targets the JS runtime, but you can't easily define macros in a self-hosted CLJS REPL (ex: one that you'd embed in a webpage). Lmk if there is a cleaner way now.
If you try the interactive examples on the main Readme page all the way to the end, you'll see there's a gradual, subtle shift from cutesy Logo to Clojure-style functional programming. But I owe more doc-writing along those lines, and they that would make that fuller & clearer.
BASIC was my first programming language. Starting with the days of the Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and MS GWBASIC, but I never understood it well enough beyond a number guessing game or so. Then I had a class on Logo, and I was doing cool stuff on my own, and it was so fun! Yeah, I love Logo.
During the time of that Logo class, I tried writing a BASIC program for a programming competition with my new-found confidence. But it was such a spectacular fail that my 11-year old self was literally crying.
I find both Logo and Clojure are profound, simple, and powerful in their own ways. A friend and I are working to take the next step with this project and make this a little more accessible/usable. ;)
Yep. Ruby springs to mind. The creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"), is Japanese. He co-wrote the first Ruby book, which was in Japanese. And a year later, he co-wrote the first book for Ruby that was in English.
https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
The size of the community is not as important as the value of what is available. It's just not widely known, or maybe there's still much potential yet unrealized.
This is an oldie but a goodie on how interactive an experience you can have when using Clojure on the front end and backend of a web app:
https://figwheel.org/
This project is the most recent and most promising iteration of someone making a very visual interactive tool for introspecting on data structures in the REPL environment
https://github.com/djblue/portal