7 ms·

Clojure Atlas, a visualization of the Clojure language & standard library

60 points by cemerick 15y ago

fdb 15y ago
The idea behind this is great. I love to get a fast, visual interface to the entire API. One thing that annoyed me however was that things keep moving. If I search for a function, it pop ups immediately but doesn't settle down, which means I have to try to read moving text. Even more annoying, the popup sometimes moves offscreen.
- cemerick 15y ago
  This (or some variation on the issue of the graph's motion / time-to-completion) is easily the #1 complaint right now. I have a variety of ideas for eliminating the problem(s).
cemerick 15y ago
FYI, my announcement post can be found @ http://cemerick.com/2011/05/03/clojure-atlas-now-available/ http://cemerick.com/2011/05/03/clojure-atlas-now-available/ (previous discussion related to my "preview" of the concept a few weeks ago is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463249 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463249) If you scroll down to the "About" section of the site's main page, you'll be able to read a brief rant of mine about the shortcomings of the walls-of-text that pass for technical documentation, and are often the only learning resource available for programmers in all sorts of contexts. Clojure Atlas is my attempt at producing a more useful, more tractable medium for understanding programming languages and the libraries that go along with them. Insofar as some of the HN crowd aims to find and build better ways of plying the trade of programming, I'm hoping this will pique your interest. I'll be around for the rest of the afternoon, and would be happy to field questions and such. After that, feel free to reach out via any of the methods provided on http://clojureatlas.com http://clojureatlas.com.
endlessvoid94 15y ago
This. looks. awesome. I spent last weekend getting destroyed by the Clojure learning process. There is a ton of documentation for different libraries and such, but there are precious few EXAMPLES. I do have to say, though, that I'm skeptical Clojure hackers will pay for this. They'll want it for free. Probably.
- cemerick 15y ago
  Thanks. :-) I hope you find this helpful. I've gotten very little pushback on the pricing so far, much to my (pleasant) surprise. This was touched on the prior HN thread on the topic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463682).
  - endlessvoid94 15y ago
    Awesome. I'd be really interested in seeing how this works out. Will be checking back :-)
  - ericlavigne 15y ago
    I would have considered this a bargain when I was doing a lot of Clojure programming. (I recently switched to Common Lisp for my first full-time Lisp job at MCNA.) I'm very curious to see how/whether you include outside libraries later.
- edoloughlin 15y ago
  "but there are precious few EXAMPLES" Have you seen http://clojuredocs.org/ http://clojuredocs.org/ - plenty of examples. Also check out http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Examples/Cookbook http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Examples/Co...
- groovy2shoes 15y ago
  Check out http://4clojure.com/ http://4clojure.com/ as a means of getting acquainted with Clojure. It's been one of the more helpful things for me the past few days. The developers are also pretty responsive.
benatkin 15y ago
That's really neat. I was able to explore and find some things I hadn't yet found. One thing I'd like is for it to show which ones I've visited. Another thing is to be able to explore common libraries outside of clojure-core and clojure-contrib.
- cemerick 15y ago
  That's great, exactly the sort of experience I was hoping to hear about! :-D I have a number of ideas about how to sanely scale things up to support arbitrary third-party libraries.
dusklight 15y ago
Does anyone else get really irritated when they see social-sharing type link buttons nowadays? It just feels like a blatant attempt to exploit my social graph. I think this is cool, but not cool enough for $25 and definitely not cool enough for me to trust you after you over-hyped it so much. There was a time when you could actually use myspace to meet interesting (real) new people. Then all of a sudden the signal-to-noise ratio imploded and the service became worthless. The value of the social graph is increasingly being coopted as people figure out how to exploit it.

60 points by cemerick 15y ago

fdb 15y ago

The idea behind this is great. I love to get a fast, visual interface to the entire API. One thing that annoyed me however was that things keep moving. If I search for a function, it pop ups immediately but doesn't settle down, which means I have to try to read moving text. Even more annoying, the popup sometimes moves offscreen.

cemerick 15y ago
This (or some variation on the issue of the graph's motion / time-to-completion) is easily the #1 complaint right now. I have a variety of ideas for eliminating the problem(s).

cemerick 15y ago

FYI, my announcement post can be found @ http://cemerick.com/2011/05/03/clojure-atlas-now-available/ http://cemerick.com/2011/05/03/clojure-atlas-now-available/ (previous discussion related to my "preview" of the concept a few weeks ago is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463249 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463249) If you scroll down to the "About" section of the site's main page, you'll be able to read a brief rant of mine about the shortcomings of the walls-of-text that pass for technical documentation, and are often the only learning resource available for programmers in all sorts of contexts. Clojure Atlas is my attempt at producing a more useful, more tractable medium for understanding programming languages and the libraries that go along with them. Insofar as some of the HN crowd aims to find and build better ways of plying the trade of programming, I'm hoping this will pique your interest. I'll be around for the rest of the afternoon, and would be happy to field questions and such. After that, feel free to reach out via any of the methods provided on http://clojureatlas.com http://clojureatlas.com.

endlessvoid94 15y ago

This. looks. awesome. I spent last weekend getting destroyed by the Clojure learning process. There is a ton of documentation for different libraries and such, but there are precious few EXAMPLES. I do have to say, though, that I'm skeptical Clojure hackers will pay for this. They'll want it for free. Probably.

cemerick 15y ago
Thanks. :-) I hope you find this helpful. I've gotten very little pushback on the pricing so far, much to my (pleasant) surprise. This was touched on the prior HN thread on the topic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463682).
- endlessvoid94 15y ago
  Awesome. I'd be really interested in seeing how this works out. Will be checking back :-)
- ericlavigne 15y ago
  I would have considered this a bargain when I was doing a lot of Clojure programming. (I recently switched to Common Lisp for my first full-time Lisp job at MCNA.) I'm very curious to see how/whether you include outside libraries later.
edoloughlin 15y ago
"but there are precious few EXAMPLES" Have you seen http://clojuredocs.org/ http://clojuredocs.org/ - plenty of examples. Also check out http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Examples/Cookbook http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Examples/Co...
groovy2shoes 15y ago
Check out http://4clojure.com/ http://4clojure.com/ as a means of getting acquainted with Clojure. It's been one of the more helpful things for me the past few days. The developers are also pretty responsive.

benatkin 15y ago

That's really neat. I was able to explore and find some things I hadn't yet found. One thing I'd like is for it to show which ones I've visited. Another thing is to be able to explore common libraries outside of clojure-core and clojure-contrib.

cemerick 15y ago
That's great, exactly the sort of experience I was hoping to hear about! :-D I have a number of ideas about how to sanely scale things up to support arbitrary third-party libraries.

dusklight 15y ago

Does anyone else get really irritated when they see social-sharing type link buttons nowadays? It just feels like a blatant attempt to exploit my social graph. I think this is cool, but not cool enough for $25 and definitely not cool enough for me to trust you after you over-hyped it so much. There was a time when you could actually use myspace to meet interesting (real) new people. Then all of a sudden the signal-to-noise ratio imploded and the service became worthless. The value of the social graph is increasingly being coopted as people figure out how to exploit it.