Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc.
in 2024. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
also: see the lists from 2023,
2022,
2021,
2020,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011
and 2010
Great posts | articles |
talks read/watched
- ELITE: The
game that couldn’t be written from Alexander the ok - Elite
was one of my favorite games on my Commodore 64 1,000,000 years ago and
so I’m a sucker for articles on this gem. If you’re interested, also
check out the annotated C64
source code.
- The
Rich History of Ham Radio Culture by Kristen Haring - I
missed out on the Ham radio craze and only recently learned about its
rich history. This article is a good overview and starting point if
you’re interested in learning too.
- Get
to Know Your Japanese Bathroom Ghosts by Eric Grundhauser -
Describes the interesting Japanese cultural folklore around bathroom
ghosts.
- The
History of WordStar by Abort Retry Fail LLC - A great
historical article about one of the most influential software suites
ever created. Additionally, the comments are a goldmine of additional
information and corrections and should not be skipped.
- Combinatory
Programming by zdsmith - Describes combinatorial
programming using motivated examples – a technique that’s surprisingly
scarce in articles about the topic.
- Philip
K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music by Open Culture -
Discusses PKD’s love for classical music and the references to
composers and their works in his fiction. The post also, includes an 11-hour
classical music playlist for your listening pleasure.
- Goodbye,
Kory by Andy Looney - The world lost Kory Heath, a game
designer whom I admire immensely. I’ve talked about his magnum opus Zendo
on this blog before and have run numerous play sessions over the years.
He was single-handedly responsible for hundreds of hours of enjoyment
around my home and within my group of friends. The world is much the
poorer without him in it. RIP.
Most viewed blog posts by me
- On
method values, part 1 - We released Clojure 1.12.0 this
year and so I wanted to write about one of the features that I worked
on. Method values are symbolic references to Java methods that can be
used in value contexts and the design and implementation of this feature
was interesting enough to talk about. The feature has been generally
well received by the Clojure community.
Favorite
technical (and technical-adjacent) books discovered (and read)
- And
so FORTH by Timothy Huang - I found this long out of print
Forth tome via inter library loan and enjoyed it immensely. It’s a nice
blend of the ideas in Brodie’s Thinking Forth and
something like Geere’s Forth:
The Next Step. It was a sad day when I had to return this beauty
back to the library because I could have used another read or two at
least.
- BASIC
and FORTH in Parallel by S.J. Wainwright - This style of
book is exactly the kind of book that I would one day like to write.
While the specifics of any such book would be different, the central
conceit is perfect. That is, this book uses BASIC to create a simple
stack machine and Forth interpreter and then presents simple Forth
programs exercising them.
Favorite non-technical books
read
- Butcher’s
Crossing by John Williams - Follows Harvard drop-out Will
Andrews as he escapes to the American frontier with a wad of cash to
find adventure and “an original relation to nature”. Andrews eventually
finds Miller who is more than happy to help the young man part with his
money in an attempt to find a hidden Colorado valley filled with buffalo
that may or may not still (if it ever did) exist. The book follows
Miller and Andrews’ (plus a skinner Schneider and driver Hoge) trek
throw the frontier and describes in harrowing detail their tribulations.
I could not stop reading and finished the book in a weekend. This one
demands multiple reads to really absorb the nuance.
- The
Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti - Contains two stories by
Ligotti: “Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People”. The first is quite
different than most of Ligotti’s work that I’ve read so far. It follows
a self-described “metaphysical mutant” and blends overtly dark humor
with an underlying pessimistic philosophy centered on a theme of
euthanasia. “The Small People” is a dream-like exploration of paranoia
and isolation. Both stories are a good introduction to the range in
Ligotti’s work if you’re interested in checking him out.
- The
Corvo Cult by Robert Scoble - Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron
Corvo) was an little-known Edwardian author who is often remembered more
for his bombastic personality than his fictional works. This book talks
about the rise and growth of the still active “Corvo Cult” – an obscure
literary fandom. In many cases, Rolfe’s fervid devotees matched the
controversial author in eccentricity, but the true fascination lies in
the broad range of people drawn to his eclectic works.
Number of books written or
published
0
Number of programming
languages designed
0.5
Favorite music discovered
- The
Paragons - At some point I became interested in the roots
of ska and The Paragons were the best group that I discovered during my
explorations.
- That’s
All! by Sammy Davis Jr. - A fantastic performance from a master
of the vocal form. The songs are brilliant but the banter between songs
will keep me listening into the distant future.*
Favorite films discovered
- Withnail
& I - Sam Aaron
recommended this film to me years ago but I only managed to watch it in
2024. It’s a great example of a dry comedy following a couple of
screw-ups and their misadventures.
- Jodorowsky’s
Dune - A documentary about the most influential film that
never was.
- Requiem for a
Dream - I’m probably the last person in the world to watch
this relentless survey of despair. Not for the faint of heart.
Favorite podcasts
- Will
Radio - Will Byrd started the year promising a KiloTube of
videos (i.e. 1024 videos) in 2024 and it’s been a blast following along!
There’s no one quite like Will and so any chance that I can get to
experience more of him I will jump on.
- Eros +
Massacre - Another podcast triumph by Samm Deighan
surveying the weird world of psychotronic cinema.
- Joy
- Joy is a mindfrak of a programming language in the concatenative
functional language family. The core of Joy is beautiful and among the
foundational programming languages in my opinion.
- Forth -
Sticking with the concatenative family in 2024, I continued to
explore Forth. Interestingly the language is incredibly rich in history
and conducive to a wide range of techniques and paradigms. I’m unsure if
I’ll ever find the opportunity to use Forth in anger, but I will say
that I should come out of my explorations a stronger programmer and
program designer.
- Java
- Working deep in the Clojure compiler means that much of my work in
2024 was in Java.
- Clojure - 2024 marks the
15th year as a full-time Clojure programmer
and the 1st year as a full-time Clojure core developer.
- ClojureScript -
Less-so now than when I was consulting full-time but I occasionally
dig into explore the implications of changes to Clojure on
CLJS.
- Datalog - The Datomic flavor of Datalog is the
flavor of choice for database access, be it in-process or in the cloud.
Again, my day-to-day usage is limited, but I have my share of personal
databases hosted on Datomic.
- Joy
- There’s a mountain of deep information on Joy that I would like to
devour in 2025.
- Mouse
- Yet another concatenative language to explore that’s long-dead but
still has some lessons to teach one such as myself.
- POP-11
- Another dead language that was designed to support AI applications
in the 70s and 80s. I love the idea of exploring the language and the
suite of applications that built up around it.
Favorite papers discovered
(and read)
- Recursion
Theory and Joy by Manfred von Thun - Joy’s underlying
reliance on combanatory programming manifests deep in the language even
to the degree that recursion in the language is implemented in userspace
via recursive combinators. This paper describes the “Joy Way” and its
relationship to recursion.
- A
Simple Applicative Language: Mini-ML (PDF) by D. Clement and J.
Despeyroux and T. Despeyroux and G. Kahn - Presents a beautiful
definition of ML language and its compilation to an abstract
machine.
Still haven’t read…
I Ching, A Fire upon the Deep, Don Quixote, and a
boat-load of sci-fi
Favorite technical
conference attended
- Clojure/conj
2024 - This was the first Clojure conference that I played
a somewhat active part in organizing. Let me be clear, my part in the
matter was minimal at best, but it did provide me a window into the
complexities of organizing a conference. The conference itself was a
blast and it was great to meet old and new Clojure friends as well as colleagues!
Favorite code read
- Restrained
Datalog in 39loc by Christophe Grande - I’ve learned over
the years that if Christophe writes a technical article then it behooves
me to study it deeply. The highlight of the year from Christophe was his
simple, yet rich, Datalog implementation in 39 lines of Clojure code.
It’s clear that 39 lines of Clojure goes a long way and especially so
when a master of the language plays in it.
- Post-Apocalyptic
Programming by Serge Zaitsev - I love the central conceit
of the post, summarized as “what technology could/should we create in
the absence of modern computing niceties?” The post starts with a CPU
emulator, builds a language for it, and motives its decisions along the
way. There’s a brilliant hard science fiction story in here somewhere, I
can feel it.
- MINT -
MINT is highly inspirational to me as a lesson in minimal
programming language design. Based on Forth, MINT makes various design
decisions and trade-offs to remain small and fast.
Life-changing technology
“discovered”
Nothing this year.
State of plans from 2023
- Clojure 1.12 - Released in early
September and one of the biggest releases in years as far as feature
additions go.
- Go much deeper down the concatenative rabbit-hole - An
unmitigated success!
- Publish even more non-technical writing - My research into
the Corvo-related archives stored at Georgetown University was a
success. However, my efforts in writing up my findings has stalled.
Plans for 2025
- Clojure 1.13 -
Thinking around the 1.13 release is ongoing and we’d like to get it
out sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.
- clojure.core.async
next - We’ve laid the groundwork for a new version of
core.async and released it as version 1.7.701. We’d love to leverage JDK
21+ virtual threads to vastly simplify core.async’s implementation and
have started along this path in earnest.
- Simplify my blog - I’d love to move away
from Wordpress in 2025.
- Juxt
- Juxt is my exploration in functional concatenative language design
built on the JVM. It’s not yet clear to me if or when I would ever
release this into the wild, but the explorations have been great fun and
I’ve used Juxt as a vehicle for finding relevant books and papers. That said, most of my programming
time is spent maintaining and evolving Clojure, but there are rare
moments of time that I can spend on Juxt, and I plan to continue to do
so in 2025.
2024 Tech Radar
- try: Boox
Go 10.3 tablet - recommended by many colleagues
- adopt: Blank
Spaces app - helps to avoid phone brain-drain
- assess: TypeScript -
What does it buy me over JS?
- hold: Zig - This looks like a
dead-end for me
- stop: Joy
of Clojure 3rd edition - Another edition is unlikely but hopefully
something else may come of this work… this is an evolving
situation.
People
who inspired me in 2024 (in no particular order)
Yuki, Keita, Shota, Craig Andera, Carin Meier, Justin Gehtland, Rich
Hickey, Nick Bentley, Paula Gearon, Zeeshan Lakhani, Brian Goetz, David
Nolen, Jeb Beich, Paul Greenhill, Kristin Looney, Andy Looney, Kurt
Christensen, Samm Deighan, David Chelimsky, Chas Emerick, Stacey Abrams,
Paul deGrandis, Nada Amin, Michiel Borkent, Alvaro Videla, Slava Pestov,
Yoko Harada, Mike Fikes, Dan De Aguiar, Christian Romney, Russ Olsen,
Alex Miller, Adam Friedman, Tracie Harris, Alan Kay, Janet A. Carr,
Wayne Applewhite, Naoko Higashide, Zach Tellman, Nate Prawdzik, Bobbi
Towers, JF Martel, Phil Ford, Nate Hayden, Sean Ross, Tim Good, Chris
Redinger, Steve Jensen, Jordan Miller, Tim Ewald, Stu Halloway, Jack
Rusher, Michael Berstein, Benoît Fleury, Rafael Ferreira, Robert
Randolph, Joe Lane, Renee Lee, Pedro Matiello, Jarrod Taylor, Jaret
Binford, Ailan Batista, Matheus Machado, Quentin S. Crisp, John Cooper,
Conrad Barski, Amabel Holland, Ben Kamphaus, Barry Malzberg (RIP), Kory
Heath (RIP).
Onward to 2025!
:F