Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with a Symbolics Lisp Machine extension card on eBay. As if we needed another reminder just how powerful current phones have become!

And no, I didn’t put a bid on that Quadra - not quite feeling this flush at the moment.

I’ve recently been working in Clojure on some code that really benefits from parallelization but doesn’t need to squeeze the last available cycle out of the machine.

Of course, if you’re using Clojure, you’re also using Leiningen as the universal build and configuration system. Accept no substitute. Now if I could only remember the syntax to run a single test when I’m refactoring some code and need to reflect the changes in the test suite via the build system and not just from inside the REPL?

A couple of interesting articles about debugging. Debugging doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention when people are taught about programming, I assume you’re supposed to acquire this skill by osmosis, but it is actually one of those skills that should receive much greater attention because it’s one of those that separates highly productive developers from, well, not so productive ones.

Why I’m Productive in Clojure. I’ve long been a fan of Lisp and Lisp-like languages, even though I wasn’t originally that happy with having Lisp inflicted on me when I was at university. Because it was weird and back then I didn’t much appreciate non-mainstream languages. These days I do because that’s where you usually find better expressiveness and ideas supposedly too strange for mainstream languages. I guess that makes me a language hipster.

I normally don’t play much with hardware, mainly because there isn’t/wasn’t much I want to do that tends to require hardware that’s not a regular PC or maybe a phone or tablet. This one is different, because no self-respecting geek would want the usual rotary control “programmable” timer to run their sprinkler system, would they?

We do live at the edge of the desert and we have pretty strict watering restrictions here. I’m all for it - water being a finite resource and all that - and I want to improve our existing sprinkler system at the same time. It doesn’t help that the people who set up the sprinklers were probably among the lower bidders, to put it politely. OK, to be blunt they seem to have failed the “giving a shit” test when they put the system together. I’ve spent a lot of  last year’s “gardening hours” just trying to make it work somewhat. Not well, just “somewhat”. Time to fix that.