14 October 2013

EuroClojure - The First Day

Today was the first day of EuroClojure 2013 and it was a really interesting first conference day. Here is my summary for all who missed it or want to remember.

States and Nomads

The opening keynote was done by Zach Tellman and he was refering to the past. He talked about Greek mythology, the architecture of Brasília and the of course the Design Pattern book. His talk was finished with a list of interesting books:

Evolving life in the browser

The next talk was Evolving life in the browser by Tom Hall. His talk was about something really new to me - Genetic Programming. The cool thing were the demos he showed like Robbie the robot, which is written in ClojureScript and runs inside of the browser:

It looks like he shares some interesting code on Github. You should also checkout his blog.

Build your own Lisp

Bodil Stokke was giving a funny talk about creating your own Lisp. Her own Lisp is called BODOL and you can find it on Github. She is using Marc Engelberg’s instaparse library to parse BODOL code. Beside the great talk there was the cool fact, that she was running her presentation slides with reveal.js inside of Emacs. How it works? She gives the answer herself:

Liberator

There was a talk about the Liberator library by Philipp Meier. It looks like a good option for creating RESTful APIs in Clojure. To give you a hello world snippet:

(defresource hello-world
  :available-media-types ["text/plain"]
  :handle-ok "Hello, world!")

The snippet shows how to define a resource and declare media types. That’s exactly, what you need in RESTful APIs.

Creative machines

My favorite talk of the day was by Joseph Wilk about Creative Machines. He showed a couple of algorithms composing music. You can find the code on Github. Suvash Thapaliya was absolutely right about this talk:

Joseph also refered to David Cope’s Emily Howell - a computer generated song. But listen yourself:

Drones with Clojure

After Joseph’s great talk and the lunch, what else should have come? Of course Jarppe Lansio. He simply had a quadrocopter and controled it via a leap motion. That’s really cool!

You can grap the code from Github.

3D game design

A talk that confused me, when I read the programme was Functional 3D Game Design by James Reeves. James has worked on different Clojure web development libraries like ring or hiccup, but now he was talking about 3D game design. He showed us a new library called reagi, which implements functional reactive programming. It can be used to create smooth behavior in 3D graphics:

Common Clojure smells

The last talk about Common Clojure Smells was given by Jen Smith. The topic is really important, since many code smells from the object oriented world can not be applied to a Lisp, but others can be found. And of course she made the mass laugh with a picture of Bruce Durling on her slide:

What else?

You can follow the event on twitter with the hash tag #euroclojure.

Richard West has put is own kind of summary of the day on the web:

Anything I have missed or some additional photos?

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