

Clojure Links To Get You Up To Speed - mattsears
http://mattsears.com/2009/6/6/20-clojure-links-to-get-you-up-to-speed

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radu_floricica
The tutorial by Mark Volkmann is great, and worth reading even if you already
program in clojure for a while. There were more then a couple of things I'd
skipped on learning in the beginning, or that were introduced after I first
read the docs.

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peregrine
I've been looking for something like this for a while. Thanks!

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chops
Awesome. This one is definitely getting bookmarked. I'm definitely planning my
next project around Clojure, just to learn the language (my current project is
in Erlang and mostly because I got the book for it first).

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menloparkbum
Cool. I just set up a Clojure dev environment.

My questions:

1\. can I make the REPL do "up arrow goes back in your command history" like
BASH does?

 _edit:_ found the answer to this in one of the tutorials

2\. Is clojure a good choice for making a screen scraping bot? normally I
would use Perl or Ruby for this.

3\. Is clojure (or any lisp) a good choice for doing complicated data
analysis?

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Zak
1\. most people don't make significant use out of the basic REPL. They use one
integrated in to their editor/IDE. Emacs/Slime is probably the most popular,
but I think there are addons for the Java IDEs too.

2\. That may depend on what you're scraping. Manipulating semi-structured text
data is one of Perl's biggest uses, so it may work a bit better than Clojure
for the same purpose. Clojure certainly has decent regex and string
capabilities though, so yes, it's a good choice.

3\. Yes. There's a very good dataflow library for Common Lisp called Cells. It
provides dependent and independent variables that work a lot like spreadsheet
cells within a program. There's a partial port to Clojure. Also, Clojure has
watchers - functions that can be attached to reference types and run whenever
their state changes. Clojure and Common Lisp are quite fast at math,
especially with type annotations.

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menloparkbum
I got a sLIME environment set up and found a screen scraping tutorial. It is a
regexp based tutorial which seems very Perlish. I guess I was wondering if
there was going to be a magical Lisp pattern matching way of doing this. I'm
building an aggregator of content for an industry filled with a bunch of
jokers who don't have RSS feeds, clean HTML and are bad at keeping things
consistent.

Next up, I'm checking out Cells. (that's for a different project than the
scraper)

Thanks!

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icey
In case anyone is thinking about buying the book: Buy it. It's very good, and
it's always nice to have a copy you can leaf through.

