Clojure/conj 2013

During a vacation cruise, a programmer's ship encounters a freak storm that leaves her shipwrecked on a desert island. Luckily the contents of one sturdy suitcase makes it to shore. With the help of a computer, Clojure, John McCarthy papers, and a Parrot AR Drone, can she survive until being rescued? Join us for this adventure where we will learn about Speech Acts, the philosophy of language, building a language with Clojure and Instaparse, and communication and friendship with machines.

• Sat, Jan 1, 09:00 - 09:40

The new Core.Async library in Clojure opens a realm of new possibilities for users of the language. This talk will start with an overview of Core.Async, and then show several examples ported from other CSP languages, such as Go and JSCP. The talk will end with a example program that runs on both Clojure and ClojureScript, leveraging this new library.

• Sat, Jan 1, 09:50 - 10:30

Cascalog is a logic programming library for Clojure that allows users to run queries on enormous datasets (using Apache Hadoop). Cascalog's 2.0 release introduces two new query compilation modes - a local mode for in-memory analysis and a Trident mode for running Cascalog queries on Storm. These new features make Cascalog extremely powerful at every corner of the big data trinity; testing, batch-processing and realtime streaming. This is a talk about the design of Cascalog's flexible, functional logic DSL. I'll discuss the protocol-based design of Cascalog's DSL and show how Clojure's dynamic dispatching made it easy to add these new compilation modes. After you learn Cascalog, you wonder how you ever did data processing any other way.

• Sat, Jan 1, 11:00 - 11:40

"Economy of Motion" (EOM) is an open-source work-in-progress vehicle energy-use simulator. I will discuss the motivation for the simulator, how Clojure's principles of simplicity were applied to reduce complexity in the underlying mathematical model, and present several examples that showcase how the simulation can be used to research vehicle energy consumption. An overview of how EOM works and the underlying theory will be briefly discussed along with specific comparisons to the ADVISOR (TM) advanced vehicle simulator, a tool that this author helped develop and currently administers as an open-source project.

• Sat, Jan 1, 11:50 - 12:30

All databases have schemas, and while Datomic provides a very flexible one, the need for working with higher-level data models, versioning them, evolving them, migrating their data from one version to another and enforcing arbitrary data constraints, often arise. We'll discuss some of these challenges and describe how Datomic can be used to build a platform that addresses those needs, how its EAVT schema can be used as the building block of much richer data models, how to take advantage of reified transactions and why data immutability is often at the center of all of it.

• Sat, Jan 1, 14:40 - 15:20

Homoiconicity is cool because the code is the data... but what happens when your data is distributed across a grid of back-end servers and you want to play with that data? Plugh [http://projectplugh.com] is an open source log analysis tool that is written in Clojure and runs on a cluster of Riak instances. Plugh allows the user to logic programming to specify manipulation of the data sets. The same logic program is executed no matter the tier... it's compiled via ClojureScript as a Map/Reduce job on Riak, applied on the server, and even applied in the browser (once again via ClojureScript). No need for the user to think differently across tiers (SQL for the data warehouse tier, but Excel for the desktop) because the same logic and the same code is used across all tiers.

• Sat, Jan 1, 15:50 - 16:30

For most of human history, furniture was built by hand using a small set of simple tools. This approach connects you in a profoundly direct way to the work, your effort to the result. This changed with the rise of machine tools, which made production more efficient but also altered what’s made and how we think about making it in in a profound way. This talk explores the effects of automation on our work, which is as relevant to software as it is to furniture, especially now that once again, with Clojure, we are building things using a small set of simple tools.

• Sat, Jan 1, 16:40 - 17:40

Clojure opens up for combining different computational models, such as functional programming, object oriented programming and logic programming. Compared to these, propagators are a relatively new declarative computational model which makes it simple to combine different sources of information, to hold conflicting views of the world and to trace what information was needed to derive values. This talk explains the underlying principles behind propagators using the newly released, extensible “propaganda” Clojure library with example problems solved using FP, LP and propagators. The talk will take the audience through the basic concepts of setting up a cell network, add propagators, combine information to refine values, extend propaganda with new datatypes, hold multiple contradictory worldviews and perform simple backtracking.

• Sat, Jan 1, 09:00 - 09:40

[Vert.x](http://vertx.io) is an asynchronous application platform built on top of [Netty (http://netty.io) that supports several JVM languages, and recently gained Clojure support. It uses a multi-reactor model to efficiently serve a high number of concurrent connections, and greatly simplifies distributed component coordination by providing built-in message passing between components within the same JVM, or on separate cluster nodes, up to and including the browser! In this talk, I'll provide an introduction to Vert.x, and cover the trade-offs of using it for developing either pure Clojure or polyglot applications.

• Sat, Jan 1, 09:50 - 10:30

Liberator is a clojure library to implement http resource correctly. I will show that HTTP is more than GET and POST and how liberator enables a developer to unleash the full power of HTTP: content-negotation, conditional requests, etc. to enable the scalability promises of the RESTful architectural style.

• Sat, Jan 1, 11:00 - 11:40

In this talk I will discuss a production rule system that I’ve developed using Clojure. I’ll start by discussing production systems, their history, and how they’re used. I will then talk about the architecture of Zeder and share some details about its construction, including (but not limited to) its use of arcane macrology and Pod-like references. Finally, I’ll run through some code examples and ideas including: knowledge and rule development, expert systems as a value, and integration with Datomic.

• Sat, Jan 1, 11:50 - 12:30

Contemporary compilers are among the most complex of software systems, typically being required to handle sophisticated high-level source languages, generate efficient code for multiple hardware architectures and operating systems, and support source-level debuggers, profilers, and other program development tools. Nanopass frameworks are designed to help manage this complexity. A nanopass compiler is comprised of many single-task passes with formally defined intermediate languages. The nanopass compiler technique evolved from a methodology for teaching a compiler course at Indiana University, into a full-fledged framework, capable of implementing a replacement for the Chez Scheme compiler that runs on par with the original compiler. This talk will discuss the idea of a nanopass compiler and the implementation of a simple language using the framework in Chez Scheme, along with the challenges and opportunities of using these techniques in Clojure

• Sat, Jan 1, 13:50 - 14:30

TBA

• Sat, Jan 1, 14:40 - 15:20