Functional Geekery Episode 18 - Eric Normand

In this episode I talk with Eric Normand. We cover Eric’s background in Clojure, his Clojure videos, core.async, teaching new topics to people, the Pre-Conj Prep for 2014, and his Clojure Gazette.

Our Guest, Eric Normand

@ericnormand on Twitter
http://www.lispcast.com/
http://www.clojuregazette.com/
http://www.purelyfunctional.tv/

Announcements

Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate is going to production. If you were wanting to find out more after Episode 15, make sure to check out the book.

Topics

How Eric got into Clojure
Lisp 50 conference
Eric’s Lisp background
Clojure Blog space is lacking beginner info
Dump everything you know into your blog
Write a post about everything in the standard library
People need to know the basics
“I can solve any problem just by typing it into Google”
Intro to Clojure videos
Kickstarter as a way to test for an audience
“I like teaching the basics”
Teaching versus just writing what you know
Kyle Kingsbury’s Intro to Clojure – Clojure from the ground up
Web Development in Clojure
core.async videos
Helping a toy factory make their toys more concurrently
The practical side of using core.async
The process of making the core.async videos
Figure out what concepts one needs to know to understand
Pre-Conj Prep
What he could guess as the background of the talk
“I’ve watched every video from every conj”
(not= DSL macros) video
Asked all the speakers if they wanted to do an interview
Clojure Gazette
The history and influences of Clojure
The ability to think at a higher level of abstraction in Clojure
Caution against being the “Smug Lisp Weenie”
What am I missing that others are being smug about
Guy Steele on bringing C/C++ programmers halfway to Lisp
Rich Hickey’s keynote at RailsConf
Find those things in Clojure that you can’t do in other languages
Continuation Style Passing in Go versus core.async
Solution to Callback Hell – core.async in Browsers
Java Concurrency in Practice
Rich Hickey’s Reading List
Import to get concurrency in from the beginning
core.async gives you a local event loop
core.async channels compared to the actor model

A giant Thank You to David Belcher for the logo design.

Episode source