Group Brilliant meeting on Skype: We 18th August
Kevin Noonan
We're scheduled to meet on Skype on Wednesday evening, August 18th.
Ulises, will it suit you better if we meet at 8pm (since your mobile
internet connection is not working)? I can meet at 7pm or 8pm.
Say when you're available and I hope we'll reach a consensus.
A recap (from the "Group Awesome..." thread):
I suggest a meeting of forty minutes to an hour (maximum).
Try to get the following done before the meeting:
* Set up a Clojure environment.
* Read as far as the end of section 1.1.6
(in the second edition PDF on the SICP group's resource page).
* And do the first set of exercises (1.1 - 1.5).
(Fall back to Scheme if Clojure is posing too much of a difficulty at
the moment.)
Suggested agenda:
* introductions. (5 min.)
* help one another with any dev. environment / setup issues. (5 min.)
* discuss any points of the material up to 1.1.6 we want to raise.
We don't have to go through it exhaustively. (15+ min.)
* Discuss solutions to the exercises. (15+ min.)
And we'll guillotine the meeting at one hour.
Ciao,
Kevin.
Ulises
> internet connection is not working)? I can meet at 7pm or 8pm.
I suggest you guys go ahead as I won't be able to make it today
(either no internet on the train or commitments as soon as I get
home). I have been reading the book, watching the lectures and I
believe to have the env. functioning properly. Of course, doing all
this on my own defeats the purpose of the study /group/ but it's just
that I can't make it today.
U
Kevin Noonan
We'll run the meeting for Group Brilliant this evening (We 18th) at
7pm on Skype.
Ciao,
Kevin.
Ulises
Did the call go ahead? Anybody interested/with enough free time to do
a write up of the summary of how it went? :)
Cheers,
U
Kevin Noonan
Stuart and I met on Skype last time and we had a wide-ranging discussion.
Without attempting to summarise it, here are some notes...
Writing Clojure (or Scheme) can quickly turn into an unmanageable nest
of brackets.
To make sense of it, aside from keeping functions short, there's tool
support for
indentation and "rainbow" highlighting.
Download a Clojure plugin for your favourite editor or IDE:
http://disclojure.org/where-to-start/
Online REPLs for Clojure:
http://tryclj.licenser.net/
http://lotrepls.appspot.com/
Off-topic:
"RMU" runs online courses for Ruby:
http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/tag/rubymendicant
"Bundler" is used for Ruby package-management; and it's part of Rails 3:
http://gembundler.com/
(We had some technical difficulties on Skype; of course, audio quality
soared after I hooked up a hard line to my cable modem!)
Ciao,
Kevin.
Rick Moynihan
> Ulises,
>
> Writing Clojure (or Scheme) can quickly turn into an unmanageable nest
> of brackets.
>
> To make sense of it, aside from keeping functions short, there's tool
> support for
> indentation and "rainbow" highlighting.
With good editor support the parentheses thing isn't even a
none-issue, it's a huge advantage (and I'm not even talking about
macros)!
Specifically I'm referring to paredit for Emacs; which provides
structured editing support for sexpressions...
http://p.hagelb.org/paredit-outline
If you've not used this, then I'd recommend it. This feature alone is
probably worth learning Emacs for Lisp hacking.
There's also diva-scheme for those using PLT/Racket:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/
Obviously the advice on keeping functions relatively small is good...
Though well written larger functions aren't too confusing if they
don't use too many conditionals (specifically if/else), as
syntactically I find Lisp's if/else's are harder to parse than the
other special forms. This is a good reason to prefer when, when-not,
cond, and condp where appropriate. Naturally using the boolean forms
of 'and', along with 'or' also helps.
R.
Ulises
Thanks for the update, much appreciated Rick :)
U