robto

This approach is really appealing to me, and it's similar to how I got my start as a software developer. I had applied for a job and been rejected, but they invited me to apply again in six months. And indeed, in six months I had learned enough and grown enough in to go from a marginal candidate to a good one. I was motivated to do it because it was a career change that had a lot of upside, and knowing that the door was potentially open encouraged me to persist.

This is something I'm very interested in, and I've actually found it very difficult to buy these shapes. Do you have a link to a supplier? I've even approached ceramic studios about getting them custom made, but without any real interest.

Bonus points if you have a supplier for einsteins!

Seems like it draws a lot of inspiration from EDN. Tagged literals, commas-as-whitespace (and optional), and anything-can-be-a-key are features I sorely miss when I have to go back to JSON.

Don't know how I feel about optional quotes around strings, that seems like a mistake. And having an immutable set literal would be nice as well.

I think the flocking behavior of birds is one of the most entrancing natural phenomena, it's great to see it play out in such an intuitive way here. Is a quadtree generalizable to three dimensions? This looks like so much fun, thank you for sharing, I'm looking forward to playing with this over the holiday.

Haha, I read The Joy of Clojure way back in 2013 and conflated the different reference types with STM. So thanks for mentioning that, I always thought it weird that you'd need STM for vars and atoms too.

That said, I have never used a ref, nor seen one in use outside of a demo blogpost.

Clojure atoms use STM, though. I've been writing Clojure for almost a decade now, it's not that STM isn't great, it's just that immutable data will carry you a very long way - you just don't need coordinated mutation except in very narrow circumstances. In those circumstances STM is great! I have no complaints. But it just doesn't come up very often.

One of the fun things about Clojure that reinforces this "trivially true" perspective is that maps and sets are functions:

    ;; "maps" the keys to the values
    (map {1 "a" 2 "b"} (take 5 (cycle 1 2))) ;;=> '("a" "b" "a" "b" "a")
    ;; acts as a predicate that tests for membership
    (filter #{"a" "b" "c"} ["a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f"]) ;;=> '("a" "b" "c")

Once you get used to this idiom you naturally start thing of other functions (or applicative functors) the same way. The syntax sugar makes for some very concise and expressive code too.

Is the Cybersecurity Fabric an open standard? I didn't see any licenses in the Github repository. Is Tidecloak just an implementation of an open protocol? Or is it entirely proprietary?

I could see using one of these as a landline replacement. I was lamenting with another parent the expense of a landline and how difficult it is for kids to call each other to arrange a park meetup or other games - this could fill that gap perfectly.

All data is a graph, and so graph query languages work well for this. SPARQL is my tool of choice but cypher and maybe GQL (though that's new).