I recently had the drive/opportunity to deep-dive on how Clojure’s namespaces function and how they provide a simple abstraction using the concept of Clojure’s “Vars”. Here is a deep-dive on how they work. This is a two-part series. The next part of the series is available at Clojure and the Esoteric Mysteries of Namespaces. Vars: A Simplified Model of Variables One of Clojure’s essential motivations is to provide a hosted runtime for easily concurrent programs, wherein most of the challenges of locking and thread-safety are provided “for free” (at least in the sense of the programmer not having to worry about these low-level concepts). ...

• clojure
• programming

Around February, a friend told me that the extremely popular (and award-winning) “Overwatch” video game was on sale for Chinese New Years. It was available at something like half off, so I picked it up and decided to try it out. This is essentially my first purchase of a video game that could be considered an FPS, a shooter, and a “Team Fortress” style objective-based unique character-driven map. Here are my thoughts on it in brief. ...

• video-games

There was a recent brouhaha in the Clojure community about the recent blog post by a Clojure dabbler to the effect that Clojure may be a clean and beautiful language but that it fails in a few pragmatic and ergonomic senses which hurts its adoption and limits its appeal. Although the author admits that he probably made a mistake in jumping to adopt Clojure, a foreign technological concept to him, for a startup in a space that was also completely foreign to him, he does bring up some worthwhile points that are worth chewing over. ...

• programming
• clojure

I recently decided to switch the backend static site compilation toolchain for this blog from the small Cryogen project in Clojure to the venerable Hugo project written in Golang. Although I had previously written that I wanted a hackable static site generator at Returning to Blogging with Cryogen, my requirements lately have changed. I thought I’d write a couple of quick notes about why I switched (and why I didn’t). ...

• meta
• python
• clojure

Over the holidays I picked up the iPad version of XCOM: Enemy Within, the previous iteration in the XCOM franchise. For those unfamiliar with XCOM, it’s a brilliant (but extremely challenging) series of turn-based tiled-map strategy games. Although I ended up wiping close to 2/3 of the way through my play through, I found Enemy Within compelling enough to try out XCOM 2, with some encouragement from friends and family. After having just beaten the game, here are my thoughts. ...

• video-games