8 ms·

Steve Yegge's foreword to Joy of Clojure

191 points by calibraxis 16y ago

swah 16y ago
I think shoving an "hydrant up in the *" won't appear on the preface...
- St-Clock 16y ago
  I just bought the ebook version and it appears as is on the preface. Not that I bought the book for the preface...
melling 16y ago
Throwing down a challenge in the preface. That's a great way to sell a book to developers.
myth_drannon 16y ago
English is not my first language but: "So nobody could be more surprised than I that a Lisp dialect ..." shouldn't it be "than ME"
- dchest 16y ago
  http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.a...
- jdludlow 16y ago
  The rule of thumb would be to fill in the implied verb and see which one makes sense. "So nobody could be more surprised than I was that a Lisp dialect ..." "So nobody could be more surprised than me was that a Lisp dialect ..." Then it becomes clear that "I" is correct.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - billmcneale 16y ago
    > Then it becomes clear that "I" is correct. No, it's not. Your sentences are correct, though, but you altered them from the original by adding a verb, thereby requiring the presence of a subject. The original sentence doesn't have a verb, therefore they need the object form. In other words: "You're stronger than I am" "You're stronger than me" This last sentence is the form used in the article.
    - hcayless 16y ago
      Sigh. English grammar is hard. The word "than" is a conjunction (like "and"), but it can also be used prepositionally. Your second sentence is more colloquial American English, and it's not wrong, but it's also not wrong to keep the nominative case ("I"), as in your first example. If the verb in the subordinate clause is the same as in the main clause, it can be assumed. tl;dr Being a grammar nazi is a mug's game.
      - billmcneale 16y ago
        Ah, so you're a conjunctionist, uh? :-) Conjunctions are supposed to connect whole sentences, and while "I am" is a complete sentence, "I" is not, which casts doubt on the correctness of "than I", thereby hinting that "than" in this case is a preposition, which mush therefore be followed by an object, e.g. "me". It's a two century old debate, but I say we settle it right now, right here, on Hacker News, once and for all. tl;dr: "than me" and "than I am" are correct. "than I" is not.
    - jdludlow 16y ago
      A pronoun in a comparison is nominative if it is the subject of a stated or understood verb. Sandy writes better than I. (Than I write.) -- Strunk & White, 4th Edition, section 10. I realize that grammar discussions are as boring as they come, but this is a case of someone learning English so it's important to be accurate.
      - ShardPhoenix 16y ago
        Strunk & White is frequently wrong and doesn't even follow it's own rules. For example, what you quoted is obviously wrong - "better than me" is correct here and is what anyone who isn't completely pretentious would write.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
d0m 16y ago
Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date. So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book. But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you ordered from manning.. So, I email manning saying that had I know about the "order at manning instead of amazon", I really would have bought it there and that I'd be more then happy to blog about "Joy of Clojure" and give a link to manning's order web page. So, then, I receive an email saying (summarized in my word): "Fu, it's your problem, next time buy it at manning, not amazon". It really frustrated me.. I mean, isn't it the best way to demolish someone's best intention? I just feel like never ever buying anything from manning; never ever linking anything to their website, and spread the word about that story. Am I over-reacting? What's your thought on that, fellow HN-users?
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  You gave a significant chunk of their profit to Amazon; it would be nice if they still gave you the PDF (which is the bonus for ordering directly from them), but not doing so is just "not nice", not rage-worthy. If you really wanted it, you could have cancelled your Amazon order and placed your order with manning...
  - d0m 16y ago
    The thing is, on joyofclojure.com, it says: "[...]The Joy of Clojure can now be pre-ordered, which gives you access to the entire book as a PDF now, plus other formats including the printed book once they're available." Which is misleading because you only get the pdf if it get pre-ordered FROM MANNING. And, yes, you are right that I give a part of their profit to amazon, but I still give them money. Maybe you are right that it is just "not nice" and not rage-worthy. Still, I don't like the idea of a company being "not nice" to someone giving them money.
    - gojomo 16y ago
      Yes, that should be worded clearer. But, there's still a way for you to get the advance PDF and Manning to get what they expected in return: you can still cancel your Amazon order and order from Manning instead. Problem solved. If you don't want to do that, then you're over-reacting.
JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Context: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... is/was reasonably well-known, and people have been speculating on which language he meant ever since [EDIT: see reply by dpritchett]. Steve Yegge doesn't quite come out and declare his preference, but... Sadly, he's not written anything on his blog in a while.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  Yegge has since admitted that NBL was Javascript. Clojure hits the sweet spot between Yegge's "JVM languages shall inherit the earth" rhetoric in the fabulous "Rhinos and Tigers" talk and his longstanding fondness for Lisp. Clojure will probably never eclipse JS in mindshare even if it is a wonderful language. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...
  - billmcneale 16y ago
    > Yegge has since admitted that NBL was Javascript. Not really, no. I work with Steve, and he's always been saddened that nobody really understood that the language he describes in his NBL article doesn't exist. He was hoping that someone would invent it.
    - jai 16y ago
      During his OSCON 2007 talk, Steve does say that "NBL" is JavaScript 2. Watch http://blip.tv/file/319044/ http://blip.tv/file/319044/ around the 24:40m mark. Then again, I don't know what's his opinion at press-time.
    - dpritchett 16y ago
      "NBL is JavaScript 2 / EcmaScript 4." http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ Of course ES4 was scuttled so I guess you're right. It can still be created.
JSig 16y ago
Attn MEAPs: I was notified this morning of the following: "We are pleased to announce that The Joy of Clojure is now complete! As a MEAP subscriber you can download your copy of the finished ebook right now! " I was starting to wonder if I was going to ever get a final copy.
- niels 16y ago
  I just requested a refund for MEAP for "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja", that I ordered almost three years ago. I didn't expect it to take that long...
  - jdludlow 16y ago
    At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, I will state again that "Joy of Clojure" is a very good book. (I'm a Clojure newbie, so I can't judge its technical content, just that it is well written.) The Manning early-access program is highly disappointing. We got an update in August 2010, and then again on March 18, 2011. Nothing in between. When I pre-order from PragProg they update their PDFs much more often, and I can see the evolution of the book.
    - claesh 16y ago
      I just downloaded the finished ebook. Searching for "monad" returns three hits. :lemonad, one mention to monadic and one mention of monads in the source list. I was a little disappointed.
      - fogus 16y ago
        Because you have a fever, and the only prescription is more monad? "Monad" is a loaded term and we didn't feel that talking about them in that way added any value to the book.
        claesh 16y ago
        I don't know what you imply with fever, I am not a native english speaker, but I just paid for your book. I am also a beginner to functional programming and curious about what monads are and I have read about them without really understanding them. I was reading up on monads the last two weeks, these are the good sources I have found for Clojure: http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure-programmers-part-1/ http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure... http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/monads_101.html http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/monads_101.html http://vimeo.com/20717301 http://vimeo.com/20717301
gtani 16y ago
4.2 on the Rant-o-meter. "fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass..." more Yegge yadda-yadda. Not sure if i prefer "class-five tropical storm" or a fire hydrant book shoved up. But those fire hydrant books, say, - Wampler / Payne's Scala book, or - Cesarini /Thompson's Erlang book - Syme/Granicz/Cisternino for F# - (dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; dunno which are scheme/common Lisp fire hydrants, and ocaml doesn't have one) are very important, not to read in their entirety, but to figure out where to find stuff when you're hauling yourself out of intermediate developer-ness i.e. get you up to understanding production code, and cover the edge cases so you can figure out the corner cases and save you asking hundreds of questions on stackoverflow. Somewhere in amazon i wrote a book review that tutorial books cover 1 sigmas of the language, standard libs and dev environment, but books that cover 2 sigmas are rare. And this is that book for clojure. And clojure does have that "perfect storm" feel
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sandGorgon 16y ago
  thanks for the list !
- dons 16y ago
  > dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; We certainly tried (and it ended up being 3x bigger than we planned): http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/ http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/
vidar 16y ago
Damn I miss that guy.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- ptn 16y ago
  I kind of got the feeling that he's lost some of his writing mojo - I didn't feel like I was reading Yegge. Maybe it was just too short a read for style to be noticeable, but I really do wish that when he truly comes back to blogging (he announced that he was back, but hasn't blogged since that), he will be at full gas again.
euroclydon 16y ago
It would be nice, when there is a thread on Clojure, if at least one person chimed in and gave an example of a problem where this lisp dialect on JVM helped them to solve a problem faster than using an existing language, like Python, C#, Java, or whatever. "Drinking through a fire hose", "understanding corner cases", and such are just euphemisms. Where's the beef?
- fogus 16y ago
  in the book.
- chapmanb 16y ago
  I learned Clojure with Joy of Clojure, the early access version, coming from a Python background with very little practical experience in Java or Lisp. It's an excellent book. The biggest advantage for my coding has actually been in my day-to-day Python work, where I'm much improved at designing functionally, parallelizing with multiprocessing, and building decorators and context functions to remove boilerplate code. So my Python is faster and cleaner; this is all thanks to being able to to think better about code design after working in Clojure. For a good example of "why Clojure" take a look at Cascalog: https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/d9Z8_q-Omr35zteJe5cbLr https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/d9Z8_q-Omr35zteJe5cbLr which leverages Hadoop/Cascading Java libraries and combines them with a Lisp-style custom query language.
  - edanm 16y ago
    Interesting. Would you say that it's worth reading, even if I don't intend to program Clojure at all in the next few years, but I am a Python programmer?
    - chapmanb 16y ago
      I would say that learning Lisp is definitely worthwhile and will improve your Python coding; pg's essay argues for Lisp better than I could: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html You'll want to not just read a book, but also get hands on experience with the language. That's where I found Clojure a good choice for me since I could work on problems of interest to my work and reuse existing Java libraries. Joy of Clojure also presents a persuasive argument in the opening chapter for Clojure, Lisp and functional programming. There is a pdf of that chapter available for free from the author's website: http://joyofclojure.com/ http://joyofclojure.com/
reinhardt 16y ago
"Clojure has only been out for three years, but it’s gaining momentum at a rate that we haven’t seen in a new language in decades" [citation needed] Unless the context is HN threads with "clojure" in the title.
jackfoxy 16y ago
Why does he mention .NET? I have not heard of Clojure being available on the .NET stack.
- fmw 16y ago
  Actually, there is https://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr https://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr, but the JVM is still the preferred platform for Clojure (although I'm sure the CLR version would be picked up once someone comes around that cares enough or in the hypothetical event that Oracle would ruin the JVM platform somehow).
- mpk 16y ago
  He mentions .NET in the same breath as the JVM because they're almost identically positioned and have almost identical capabilities.
eneveu 16y ago
Looks like dpritchett was right all along :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579118 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579118

191 points by calibraxis 16y ago

swah 16y ago

I think shoving an "hydrant up in the *" won't appear on the preface...

St-Clock 16y ago
I just bought the ebook version and it appears as is on the preface. Not that I bought the book for the preface...

melling 16y ago

Throwing down a challenge in the preface. That's a great way to sell a book to developers.

myth_drannon 16y ago

English is not my first language but: "So nobody could be more surprised than I that a Lisp dialect ..." shouldn't it be "than ME"

dchest 16y ago
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.a...
jdludlow 16y ago
The rule of thumb would be to fill in the implied verb and see which one makes sense. "So nobody could be more surprised than I was that a Lisp dialect ..." "So nobody could be more surprised than me was that a Lisp dialect ..." Then it becomes clear that "I" is correct.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- billmcneale 16y ago
  > Then it becomes clear that "I" is correct. No, it's not. Your sentences are correct, though, but you altered them from the original by adding a verb, thereby requiring the presence of a subject. The original sentence doesn't have a verb, therefore they need the object form. In other words: "You're stronger than I am" "You're stronger than me" This last sentence is the form used in the article.
  - hcayless 16y ago
    Sigh. English grammar is hard. The word "than" is a conjunction (like "and"), but it can also be used prepositionally. Your second sentence is more colloquial American English, and it's not wrong, but it's also not wrong to keep the nominative case ("I"), as in your first example. If the verb in the subordinate clause is the same as in the main clause, it can be assumed. tl;dr Being a grammar nazi is a mug's game.
    - billmcneale 16y ago
      Ah, so you're a conjunctionist, uh? :-) Conjunctions are supposed to connect whole sentences, and while "I am" is a complete sentence, "I" is not, which casts doubt on the correctness of "than I", thereby hinting that "than" in this case is a preposition, which mush therefore be followed by an object, e.g. "me". It's a two century old debate, but I say we settle it right now, right here, on Hacker News, once and for all. tl;dr: "than me" and "than I am" are correct. "than I" is not.
  - jdludlow 16y ago
    A pronoun in a comparison is nominative if it is the subject of a stated or understood verb. Sandy writes better than I. (Than I write.) -- Strunk & White, 4th Edition, section 10. I realize that grammar discussions are as boring as they come, but this is a case of someone learning English so it's important to be accurate.
    - ShardPhoenix 16y ago
      Strunk & White is frequently wrong and doesn't even follow it's own rules. For example, what you quoted is obviously wrong - "better than me" is correct here and is what anyone who isn't completely pretentious would write.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

d0m 16y ago

Just a word.. not that it is really relevant but I wanted to share this with fellow hackers. To encourage the Clojure community/language, I've pre-ordered the book Joy of Clojure on amazon. On the book's website, it is clearly stated that you also get a free pdf of the book before the release date. So, I was pretty enthusiastic about starting to read the book. But then, I find out that you only get the pdf if you ordered from manning.. So, I email manning saying that had I know about the "order at manning instead of amazon", I really would have bought it there and that I'd be more then happy to blog about "Joy of Clojure" and give a link to manning's order web page. So, then, I receive an email saying (summarized in my word): "Fu, it's your problem, next time buy it at manning, not amazon". It really frustrated me.. I mean, isn't it the best way to demolish someone's best intention? I just feel like never ever buying anything from manning; never ever linking anything to their website, and spread the word about that story. Am I over-reacting? What's your thought on that, fellow HN-users?

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
You gave a significant chunk of their profit to Amazon; it would be nice if they still gave you the PDF (which is the bonus for ordering directly from them), but not doing so is just "not nice", not rage-worthy. If you really wanted it, you could have cancelled your Amazon order and placed your order with manning...
- d0m 16y ago
  The thing is, on joyofclojure.com, it says: "[...]The Joy of Clojure can now be pre-ordered, which gives you access to the entire book as a PDF now, plus other formats including the printed book once they're available." Which is misleading because you only get the pdf if it get pre-ordered FROM MANNING. And, yes, you are right that I give a part of their profit to amazon, but I still give them money. Maybe you are right that it is just "not nice" and not rage-worthy. Still, I don't like the idea of a company being "not nice" to someone giving them money.
  - gojomo 16y ago
    Yes, that should be worded clearer. But, there's still a way for you to get the advance PDF and Manning to get what they expected in return: you can still cancel your Amazon order and order from Manning instead. Problem solved. If you don't want to do that, then you're over-reacting.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago

Context: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht... is/was reasonably well-known, and people have been speculating on which language he meant ever since [EDIT: see reply by dpritchett]. Steve Yegge doesn't quite come out and declare his preference, but... Sadly, he's not written anything on his blog in a while.

dpritchett 16y ago
Yegge has since admitted that NBL was Javascript. Clojure hits the sweet spot between Yegge's "JVM languages shall inherit the earth" rhetoric in the fabulous "Rhinos and Tigers" talk and his longstanding fondness for Lisp. Clojure will probably never eclipse JS in mindshare even if it is a wonderful language. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/rhinos-and-tigers.ht...
- billmcneale 16y ago
  > Yegge has since admitted that NBL was Javascript. Not really, no. I work with Steve, and he's always been saddened that nobody really understood that the language he describes in his NBL article doesn't exist. He was hoping that someone would invent it.
  - jai 16y ago
    During his OSCON 2007 talk, Steve does say that "NBL" is JavaScript 2. Watch http://blip.tv/file/319044/ http://blip.tv/file/319044/ around the 24:40m mark. Then again, I don't know what's his opinion at press-time.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    "NBL is JavaScript 2 / EcmaScript 4." http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ Of course ES4 was scuttled so I guess you're right. It can still be created.

JSig 16y ago

Attn MEAPs: I was notified this morning of the following: "We are pleased to announce that The Joy of Clojure is now complete! As a MEAP subscriber you can download your copy of the finished ebook right now! " I was starting to wonder if I was going to ever get a final copy.

niels 16y ago
I just requested a refund for MEAP for "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja", that I ordered almost three years ago. I didn't expect it to take that long...
- jdludlow 16y ago
  At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this topic, I will state again that "Joy of Clojure" is a very good book. (I'm a Clojure newbie, so I can't judge its technical content, just that it is well written.) The Manning early-access program is highly disappointing. We got an update in August 2010, and then again on March 18, 2011. Nothing in between. When I pre-order from PragProg they update their PDFs much more often, and I can see the evolution of the book.
  - claesh 16y ago
    I just downloaded the finished ebook. Searching for "monad" returns three hits. :lemonad, one mention to monadic and one mention of monads in the source list. I was a little disappointed.
    - fogus 16y ago
      Because you have a fever, and the only prescription is more monad? "Monad" is a loaded term and we didn't feel that talking about them in that way added any value to the book.
      - claesh 16y ago
        I don't know what you imply with fever, I am not a native english speaker, but I just paid for your book. I am also a beginner to functional programming and curious about what monads are and I have read about them without really understanding them. I was reading up on monads the last two weeks, these are the good sources I have found for Clojure: http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure-programmers-part-1/ http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure... http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/monads_101.html http://intensivesystems.net/tutorials/monads_101.html http://vimeo.com/20717301 http://vimeo.com/20717301

gtani 16y ago

4.2 on the Rant-o-meter. "fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass..." more Yegge yadda-yadda. Not sure if i prefer "class-five tropical storm" or a fire hydrant book shoved up. But those fire hydrant books, say, - Wampler / Payne's Scala book, or - Cesarini /Thompson's Erlang book - Syme/Granicz/Cisternino for F# - (dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; dunno which are scheme/common Lisp fire hydrants, and ocaml doesn't have one) are very important, not to read in their entirety, but to figure out where to find stuff when you're hauling yourself out of intermediate developer-ness i.e. get you up to understanding production code, and cover the edge cases so you can figure out the corner cases and save you asking hundreds of questions on stackoverflow. Somewhere in amazon i wrote a book review that tutorial books cover 1 sigmas of the language, standard libs and dev environment, but books that cover 2 sigmas are rare. And this is that book for clojure. And clojure does have that "perfect storm" feel

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sandGorgon 16y ago
thanks for the list !
dons 16y ago
> dunno if real World Haskell is a fire hydrant; We certainly tried (and it ended up being 3x bigger than we planned): http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/ http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/

vidar 16y ago

Damn I miss that guy.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ptn 16y ago
I kind of got the feeling that he's lost some of his writing mojo - I didn't feel like I was reading Yegge. Maybe it was just too short a read for style to be noticeable, but I really do wish that when he truly comes back to blogging (he announced that he was back, but hasn't blogged since that), he will be at full gas again.

euroclydon 16y ago

It would be nice, when there is a thread on Clojure, if at least one person chimed in and gave an example of a problem where this lisp dialect on JVM helped them to solve a problem faster than using an existing language, like Python, C#, Java, or whatever. "Drinking through a fire hose", "understanding corner cases", and such are just euphemisms. Where's the beef?

fogus 16y ago
in the book.
chapmanb 16y ago
I learned Clojure with Joy of Clojure, the early access version, coming from a Python background with very little practical experience in Java or Lisp. It's an excellent book. The biggest advantage for my coding has actually been in my day-to-day Python work, where I'm much improved at designing functionally, parallelizing with multiprocessing, and building decorators and context functions to remove boilerplate code. So my Python is faster and cleaner; this is all thanks to being able to to think better about code design after working in Clojure. For a good example of "why Clojure" take a look at Cascalog: https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/d9Z8_q-Omr35zteJe5cbLr https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/d9Z8_q-Omr35zteJe5cbLr which leverages Hadoop/Cascading Java libraries and combines them with a Lisp-style custom query language.
- edanm 16y ago
  Interesting. Would you say that it's worth reading, even if I don't intend to program Clojure at all in the next few years, but I am a Python programmer?
  - chapmanb 16y ago
    I would say that learning Lisp is definitely worthwhile and will improve your Python coding; pg's essay argues for Lisp better than I could: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html You'll want to not just read a book, but also get hands on experience with the language. That's where I found Clojure a good choice for me since I could work on problems of interest to my work and reuse existing Java libraries. Joy of Clojure also presents a persuasive argument in the opening chapter for Clojure, Lisp and functional programming. There is a pdf of that chapter available for free from the author's website: http://joyofclojure.com/ http://joyofclojure.com/

reinhardt 16y ago

"Clojure has only been out for three years, but it’s gaining momentum at a rate that we haven’t seen in a new language in decades" [citation needed] Unless the context is HN threads with "clojure" in the title.

jackfoxy 16y ago

Why does he mention .NET? I have not heard of Clojure being available on the .NET stack.

fmw 16y ago
Actually, there is https://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr https://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr, but the JVM is still the preferred platform for Clojure (although I'm sure the CLR version would be picked up once someone comes around that cares enough or in the hypothetical event that Oracle would ruin the JVM platform somehow).
mpk 16y ago
He mentions .NET in the same breath as the JVM because they're almost identically positioned and have almost identical capabilities.

eneveu 16y ago

Looks like dpritchett was right all along :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579118 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579118