I like Lispy languages. One I’ve been playing with – and occasionally been using for smaller projects – is Clojure. Clojure projects usually use Leiningen for their build system. There are generally two ways to install leiningen – just download the script as per the Leiningen web site, or use the OS package manager. I usually prefer using the OS package manager, but Manjaro doesn’t include leiningen as a package in its repositories. Installing leiningen is pretty easy via the package manager and I’ll show you how.

Uncle Bob Martin discovered Clojure fairly recently and really, really likes it. Having had the privilege to see him speak at various SD West conferences back when they still were a thing, I wasn’t surprised by this. Anyway, do yourself a favour and spend a few minutes reading the article. It’s worth your time.

I also strongly agree with him that reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is very much worth the effort. It is a very well written book, especially as computer science textbooks go. It’s not going to land you a new job with the latest hotness in technology, but it will help you improve your knowledge of computer science fundamentals. Those fundamentals are allow you to build a long term career and going from an “XX programmer” to a well rounded software engineer.

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?

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.