(iterate think thoughts)

Last time we created a database to store users, and created pages allowing users to create new accounts and login.

I'm going to take a short break from Noir tutorials and do a post on optimization and profiling instead.

This is the second part of the Noir tutorial, where we'll continue to cover the basics of building a website.

Background Clojure web stack consists of Ring, which is the base HTTP library akin to Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack.

A few months ago I was tasked with generating reports for one of the applications I was working on.

Writing a blog engine in Noir turned out to be a very pleasant experience.

Steve Yegge has made a post introducing the idea of liberalism and conservatism in programming languages.

The Results of the 2012 State of Clojure survey are out, and they look very exciting indeed.

I recently got invited to join Planet Clojure, which is an excellent place for keeping up with what people are up to in Clojure world.

This blog is built on top of Noir, which is quite excellent for the most part.

Sometimes you might run into a situation where you're using a library which defines a certain function in a way that might not work the way you need it to in a particular context.

Lisp macros can be rather confusing and especially so for newcomers.

An expressive language has many benefits.

There's a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery that says: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

You might have heard terms such as anonymous functions, first class functions, higher order functions, and closures.

When you start learning functional programming you will quickly notice that you can't simply mutate data in place as you might be used to.

One thing I love about working in Clojure is how interactive the development environment is.

Design patterns are heavily used in the OO world, and there are many lengthy books written about them.

If you've seen any Lisp code before, you've probably noticed that it looks different from other languages in that the parens come before the function name, prefix notation is prevalent, and that functions are often nested inside one another.

Objects are state machines, yet no mainstream OO language ensures the consistency of the internal state of the object over time.

A common complaint you hear from people about Lisp is that there are too many parens.

The argument that Lisp is not popular because it's somehow a bad language is not really sound.

In Java passing logic as a parameter requires an inordinate amount of work and it's never the first choice to do so.

Instance methods are always associated with a particular object that may or may not exist.

The OO world view requires us to classify data in order to work with it.