In my talk at Clojure Conj I mentioned how a project from Oracle Labs named GraalVM might have to potential for Clojure to interop with Python on the same VM. At the time of the talk, I had just learned about it so I didn’t have time to take a look at it. Over the last week, I’ve managed to take it for a test drive and I wanted to share what I found. ...

So, you have an idea for a fiction book. First, let me tell you that it’s a good idea and it’s a great thing that you are a coder. Quite a few successful authors have a background in software development. Arrival, (which is a fabulous movie), comes from the book, Stories of your Life, written by a fellow programmer Ted Chiang. Charlie Stross is another fine example. One of my favorites is [Daniel Suarez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Suarez_(author), the author of the Daemon and more recently Change Agent. So yes, you can write a fiction book and you’re in good company. This post is dedicated to help make it happen. ...

Update: Cortex has moved along since I first wrote this blog post, so if you are looking to run the examples, please go and clone the Cortex repo and look for the cats and dogs code in the examples directory. There is an awesome new Clojure-first machine learning library called Cortex that was open sourced recently. I’ve been exploring it lately and wanted to share my discoveries so far in this post. In our exploration, we are going to tackle one of the classic classification problems of the internet. How do you tell the difference between a cat and dog pic? ...

Clojure.spec is a new library for Clojure that enables you to write specifications for your program. In an earlier post, I showed off some of it’s power to generate test data from your specifications. It’s a pretty cool feature. Given some clojure.spec code, you can generate sample data for you based off of the specifications. But what if you could write a program that would generate your clojure.spec program based off of data so that you could generate more test data? ...

I sit next to my daughter, showing her programming for the first time. (+ 1 1) “Now press enter.” 2 “Pretty cool, huh?” She looks unimpressed. I fear I’m losing her. How can I explain that this is just a small tip of something so much bigger? You can make the code sing to you. You can take these numbers, turn them into notes, and line them up with the beat of your heart. Bring in the melody and chorus and build them up to a crescendo. Let it crash in waves and then ...

So you want to write a book? Awesome. I’ve been working on one too for the last year. No, it’s not really a programming book, but it does have code in it. It’s a sci-fi/fantasy book written for my ten year daughter, but this post isn’t about that. It’s about sharing the tools and setup that I’ve found work best for me. Tools for Writing If the first thing you think of when you want to write a book is creating some really cool tools to help you, I can totally relate. It’s a programmer thing. ...

Clojure.spec is an exciting, new core library for Clojure. It enables pragmatic specifications for functions and brings a new level of robustness to building software in Clojure, along with unexpected side benefits. One of which is the ability to write specifications that generate Dr. Seuss inspired rhymes. In this blog post, we’ll take a tour of writing specifications for a clojure function, as well as the power of data generation. First, some inspirational words: ...

It happened again. I was sitting down reading a paper and I came across the phrase Kolmogorov-Uspensky machine and I had no idea what it was. My initial reaction was just to move on. It probably wasn’t important, I told myself, just a detail that I could skim over. I took a sip of my tea and continued on. The next paragraph it appeared again. It was just sticking up like a thread waiting to be pulled. Still, I resisted. After all, I wasn’t even near my computer. I would have to get up an walk into the other room. After considering it for a moment, inertia won out and I continued my reading. There it was once more. This time right in the same paragraph, silently mocking me. I knew I had to do something so I strode to my computer and pulled the thread. ...

This post continues our exploration from the last blog post Why Hyperdimensional Socks Never Match. We are still working our way through Kanerva’s paper. This time, with the basics of hypervectors under our belts, we’re ready to explore how words can be expressed as context vectors. Once in a high dimensional form, you can compare two words to see how similar they are and even perform reasoning. To kick off our word vector adventure, we need some words. Preferring whimsy over the Google news, our text will be taken from ten freely available fairy tale books on http://www.gutenberg.org/. ...

The nature of computing in hyperdimensions is a strange and wonderful place. I have only started to scratch the surface by reading a paper by Kanerva. Not only is it interesting from a computer science standpoint, it’s also interesting from a cognitive science point of view. In fact, it could hold the key to better model AI and general reasoning. This blog is a casual stroll through some of the main points of Kanerva’s paper along with examples in Clojure to make it tangible. First things first, what is a hyperdimension? ...