fogus

One philosophy of Clojure is to facilitate building practical and robust systems. In practice, people do runtime checking of maps using punning, some kind of `nil` check, or a more ponderous `(get m k sentinel)` checking pattern. The new feature obviates the latter as destructuring syntax in the vast majority of cases where the absence of the key throws. It's opt-in, so if Malli/Spec work then you don't need to use this. I will say that we have some other things brewing that compose well with `:keys!` and friends and the 1.13 release is going to DRY a lot of existing and future Clojure code.

The whole Clojure team should be on the chat with him also.

No one cares less about defending themselves being attacked than the dead.

Using "performative" as a pejorative is dismissive. I like to read and I like to write. These are my hobbies and as a result posts like this come out. I will not apologize for finding certain topics exciting and being excited by a desire to share my excitement with the world. You say that the "Internet would be a better place if it'd be full of content like this post." I agree, and so I share.

By the way. I don't like beer.

That’s a lot of words to pass judgment on someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. The strawman that you’ve created doesn’t resemble my life at all, but you go on feeling smug about being better than the construct in your head. Whatever helps you to sleep at night I guess…

I completely forgot to bring up the 2600 section in my post! Reading distance dialing led me down a deep rabbit hole. An interesting path was learning more about Joe Engressia (Joybubbles) who could whistle a 2600hz tone to circumvent the supervisory tone which led him to learn more about the system and further the knowledge of the early phreaking community. Folklore around him was off the charts and eventually painted a picture of a superhero who could whistle his way through the whole phone network and into free calls to anywhere just with his mouth. The document linked in my post gives details about the long-distance signalling and why being a great whistler was not good enough. That said, definitely check out more about Engressia, because while the whistling wasn't superhuman, the curiousity and drive to learn more may have been!

If you do a search for Shimaenaga Weekly Calendar then you’ll find something that’s very similar and may be able to similar ones that work better for you.

I got mine in Japan at a store called Loft, but I suspect that you’d have to pay a substantial mark up to get the same thing elsewhere.

Technical followed by non-technical. I read more than these, but these are the highlights.

Mouse, a Language for Microcomputers by Peter Grogono - Mouse is basically an esolang with barely any abstraction facilities, but the book was well-written and the language compelling enough to explore further.

Notes on Distance Dialing (pdf) by AT&T - Described the telephone systems of the USA and Canada in the mid-1950s. The reading is a dry as it gets, but it was a fascinating dive into a vastly complex system solving extremely hard problems. This is a must-read for folks interested in systems-thinking. That said, I am actively looking for recommendations for books about the process of designing and building the unbelievably complex telephony system over the rudiments of the earlier systems. Recommendations welcomed!

The Eye of Osiris by R. Austin Freeman - This is the first book that I’ve read from Freeman and I suspect that I will read many more in the future. The story follows the disappearance of John Bellingham, Egyptologist and the subsequent investigation. As the investigation stalls, the eminent Dr. Thorndyke digs into the case. The story sets up the mystery nicely and indeed provides enough information to the reader to infer how the disappearance occurred and who or what facilitated it. The book is one of the best whodunits that I’ve ever read.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens - His final work remains unfinished as he passed away before he could complete it. Further complicating the meta-story is that he also didn’t outline the ending nor even put to paper the “villain” of the story. The meta-mystery of the ending has motivated a mountain of speculation around the ending including dozens of continuations of the story from other authors, all deriving their pet endings from textual hints, accounts from Dickens’ friends, illustration notes, and even in some cases seances supposedly accompanied by the spirit of Dickens himself. What was written by Dickens is spectacular and a compelling mystery and although it would be great to know the resolution, in some ways the “Droodiana” that has cropped up over the past 150+ years is reason enough for it to remain a mystery. The whole lore around Edwin Drood is a worthwhile hobby in itself and well-worth exploring. The Chiltern Library edition of the book contains the story and a good bit of the lore around the writing and the meta-works available at the time of its publication.

The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair - Sadly out of print and difficult to find, but I’ve had it on my shelves for decades and finally got around to reading it. The book came onto my radar in the 1980s when I learned about it in the appendix-n of the 1st edition Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide. I enjoyed many of the books at the time and have slowly swung around to re-reading them over the past few years. Sadly, most on the list do not stand the test of time for me, but St. Clair’s mixture of 60s counter-cultural leanings in a fantasy/sf world still works. The cultural touch-points in the book feel quite dated, but despite the occasional awkwardness, the story is unique even today.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner - The book started as a passable novel of manners focused on a turn of the century British middle-class family. The titular character was mostly background decoration for the first third of the novel and AFAIR was talked about only in the third-person. It’s only when she made the choice to move out on her own to the country in her middle age does she gain a central role in the narrative and her inner thoughts revealed. This is where things really pick up because I was shocked to learn that this unassuming woman’s inner thoughts had a delicious darkness to them. I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ll just say that you will not expect how the story ends.

Patience by Daniel Clowes - A profound graphic novel using time-travel to explore the idea of enduring love with a story that proceed through time, following Jack as he tries to alter the past and save the woman he loves. This well-known science fiction motif is elevated by Clowes’ signature psychological complexity.

Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse - I’ve read most of the books by Hermann Hesse but this one escaped my attention until this year. The story follows the parallel lives of a monk Narcissus and his passionate friend Goldmund as they respectively search for meaning in life through spiritual means and through pleasures of the flesh.

We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ - A small group of astronauts crash land on a hostile alien world and quickly realize that rescue is unlikely to come. Many SF stories have started this way and so the expectation is that this is a colonization story… but Russ thrives on subverting reader expectations.

Fifty Forgotten Records by R.B. Russell - Another lovely entry in Russell’s series (one can hope) of autobiographical explorations of art, so far covering literature and now music. This book describes 50 records of varying popularity and Russell’s personal connections to each. While I certainly enjoyed finding a dozen or so new albums to explore, the true triumph of the book lies in the vulnerable, reflective memoir threaded throughout.

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler A novel that follows 4-generations of the Ponitifex family, with a particular bildungsroman-esque thread around Ernest, a young man who’s naivete leads to his downfall and how his life unfolds thereafter.

I wrote about these (and more) at https://blog.fogus.me/2025/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-o...

I would be a failed science fiction / horror writer.

LLMs have had very little influence on my programming so far.

This isn't the 18th century anymore where the dissemination of arguments barely traveled outside of the immediate vicinity, this is the globally networked firehose of disinformation blasted right in your face 24-hours a day. Relying on better arguments to win hearts and minds in this environment is hopelessly naive.

If you can establish a base of support populated by the easily fooled then you can grift them indefinitely.

No programming language is more important than its best and worst ideas.

https://blog.fogus.me

Programming posts, some gaming talk, and occasional random ramblings.

REBL wanted to be your REPL but Morse uses the REPL that it's hosted in or remotely connected to.

Clojure REPL-based dev is better for me personally

me too! Morse is complementary to your normal REPL-based workflow. it is designed to not get in the way of that.

there are so many lessons that we need to understand and leverage in our modern tooling, languages, and systems that Smalltalk and Lisp got right decades ago.

It's unclear if Walpole's Castle of Otranto is the first horror, but in any case it predates Frankenstein by 53 years.

i'm struggling to understand the question.

The early 1900s mystical fiction is a rabbit hole for sure. Voyage to Arcturus is a very good recommendation! Others in this vein include, but are not limited to:

Armed with Madness by Mary Butts

The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser

The Stone Dragon by R. Murray Gilchrist

and so many more.

Agree, but keep in mind that the sf list was posted in 2012.

The system in UBAInc is pretty well fleshed out in the book and at one time in the rings-era WWW there were people creating their own versions of the game -- some very good.

My intent was not to limit the school geographically. Calling it the German School was an artistic flourish that I couldn't resist. :)

unlike any implementation of Clojure I'm aware of, both Smalltalk and Common Lisp implementations support handling an error or other exception by starting up a nested repl...

I think that we've not taken the development of REPLs seriously enough in the Clojure community and have left a lot of power in the past because of it. Things could get a lot better for the state of nested REPLs and I've been knee-deep in explorations along one vector lately that I hope might push that angle just a little bit further along.

make lots of his supporters think that was the intention all along

His listeners believe that the literal devil controls the government, Hollywood, and the minds of liberal minded people. His listeners believe that Klaus Schwab secretly controls the United States and that his goal is to feminize men and cut off children's sex organs. His listeners believe that Sandy Hook never happened and the parents are crisis actors. His listeners will believe all kinds of insane things but that has nothing to do whether justice should be served or not.

This is a great suggestion. I immediately checked archive.org and found a bonanza of Microwriter material. https://archive.org/search.php?query=microwriter&sin=

Very good list, I look forward to diving into those that I've not had any exposure to. Without a doubt Kogge and Brodie will appear on my list one day.

This is an ongoing project so there are many in my personal library that need coverage. That said, _why’s guide is probably too well known for this list.

The contributor list is append-only. :)