Not Dead Yet!

I'm back. For the moment, anyway. More about that below.

What have I been up to? A lot, really.

• General life stuff, of course. It always gets in the way.
• My wife and I have adopted a little girl, and that keeps us busy, both with adoption busyness and with new parent busyness.
• I've started a new job.
• As far as programming goes, I'm exploring function programming. Clojure got me started, and since then I've branched out to Haskell and F#. I primarily wanted to learn Haskell, but I've had more opportunity to use F#. At some point, I should compare the two.

Speaking of Clojure, I recently finished scanning my dead-tree edition of Programming Clojure. It has good, practical examples. (I've taught enough to know how hard it is to have practical examples.) For example, Lancet is an extended example that Stuart Halloway develops throughout the book. It creates a DSL for build files (think make). The system itself is built upon ant, but it creates a nice interface layer on top of that.

The book is also a good introduction to functional programming, including how it's different than object-oriented programming and how to use it best for the benefits it gives for concurrency and other problems.

---

I'll close this post by outlining the direction I'd like to take this blog. I think I've implied in the past that I haven't been happy that it's turned into a Clojure tutorial (nice though that is). I just haven't been sure what I wanted it to become. I think I've finally got some ideas.

Primarily, I'd like Writing/Coding to be more results oriented. I'll still talk about text- and natural-language-processing, but instead of a lot of code and nuts-and-bolts, I'll focus on the results of those analysis and visualizations and pretty pictures. There will still be some code, but much, much less. For a while now, I've been interested in data visualization, and this will give me an opportunity to explore that.

This will also be much less Clojure-centric. Clojure will still be here, certainly, but you can also expect some Python, Haskell, F#, and who-knows-what. (BF, anyone?)

First off, I need to brainstorm some post ideas, outline a dozen or so of those, and draft a few to have ready. Once that's taken care of, I'll start posting here again. That won't happen immediately, but I hope to get it done real soon now.

In the meantime, go get Programming Clojure.

I'm Ba-a-ack

Boy, but doesn't life just get in the way sometimes?

On the other hand, I have also let it keep me from posting. I was getting so bored with the Clojure tutorial series. I hate to think how tired you must have been with it.

But I'm back, and I'm going to make some changes.

1. I've put a link to the table of contents for the Clojure tutorial in the sidebar. No matter how tired I am of it, it's still the main content on here.

2. I'm going to continue the Clojure tutorial, but the pace won't be quite as relentless as it was. Hopefully, I'll be able to inject a little more energy into it, and it won't be quite as boring.

3. I'm going to intersperse the tutorial with some other postings. I'll catch you up on what I've been doing, as well as talk about some other things that have caught my interest.

That's it. The moral: When you're getting tired, take a break and retool.

Hiatus

Hey. This is a short post to let you know I haven’t disappeared: life’s just gotten in the way.

My wife had a kidney stone (it’s passed now).

July 4th weekend.

And this blog. The next topic—stemming—is going to take longer than I’d planned. It’s going to touch on a lot of topics that I wanted to put off to later. So I’m taking some time to figure out the best way to approach things.

But I’m still here.

New Focus

I was beginning to think that this blog was seriously dead. Life has just been too much in the way. But lately, I've begun to suspect there is life here after all. Besides just being busy, part of why I have thought this this blog might be beyond hope was because I wasn't happy with its focus. Splitting my attention here between writing and coding was giving me a headache. I have also generally written longer postings, and that had become overwhelming. So I'm going to focus on shorter postings about programming and computer toys I'm playing with. (I'll probably start a writing blog elsewhere at some point. I'll keep you posted.) I was going to include a brief note about one of those toys, but I'll stop now and save that for a later.