This week I worked more on Simply Scheme. I got done with Chapter Six. Chapter Seven looks pretty short.
The Austin Clojure group had a code get-together at Cafe Express. There were only a few of us there. I worked on Simply Scheme.
One thing a lot of veteran Lisp/Scheme people do not like about Clojure is that it uses other characters for data structures (vectors, maps, sets) in places where other Lisps just use parentheses. I think I agree with Clojure for changing things a bit. I think it makes things more clear. There was a line about this topic in Chapter 7 of Simply Scheme that made me think about this:
Like cond, let uses parentheses both with the usual meaning (invoking a procedure) and to group sub-arguments that belong together.
There was a lot of discussion about JavaScript at the Clojure Meetup this weekend. I generally do not like anything related to JavaScript, not even ClojureScript. I have heard great things about it, and that David Nolen is a really smart guy, but it just seems like if you use ClojureScript, you will probably have to deal with a bunch of JavaScript anyway. So for now, I am not too eager to do anything mobile with Clojure. It seems like ReactNative still has a bad license, and you have to deal with Node on top of it all.
A couple of guys mentioned WebAssembly. I first read about that on the Racket mailing list in a thread in which a few people (myself included) were lamenting the inescapability of JavaScript. I think it is a drag that a lot of people want to use JavaScript everywhere. I would like an actual alternative (not just yet another *js framework, or a language that transpiles to JS). Will that be WebAssembly?
Someone on Hacker News somewhere warned that if a site uses WebAssembly, a site could prevent you from blocking ads if they really wanted to force you to see them. Stay tuned.
You’re welcome.
Image from “Evangelia. Maître du Registrum Gregorii (09..-099. ?). Enlumineur”, a 10th century manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF; image assumed allowed under Fair Use.