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Dyson Sphere Around a Pulsar

Well this year has been rough for Chlorine.

Basically, I wanted to keep Chlorine plugin working, but Atom was degrading over time. So, I decided to… make a new editor from the ashes of Atom! Or, basically, reuse the plugins that already had the visual elements, for example, and creates a new thing.

That obviously didn’t go right. The reason is quite simple – in the beginning, the idea was to reuse the fragments and plugins of the Atom, even if I had to depend on internal state because, sure, Atom was stale but at least it was receiving updates and security bumps over time, even when their Electron version was really far from the latest stable.

But then Atom died and I had to make a choice. Either I would keep developing Saturn and give up Atom completely (that was one of my ideas), or I could try to keep a version of Atom that did not have the backend functionality; another option was to change editors, for example, to a NeoVim version that had a webview, and focus on developing Clematis. None of these were ideal, especially because the only NeoVim editor that have a programmable webview is NyaoVim, and that is also dead.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

The power of finding facts about personal preferences

It is unfortunate, really, that it’s 2021, and we still try to justify our personal preferences with “facts” that simply don’t exist.

I’m really sorry if this sounds aggressive, but as someone that saw this same pattern happening again and again, I’m quite tired. As Obie told us on a great talk about programming, music students, and painting, the pallette is not the point! Programming languages, frameworks, libraries, virtual machines are pallettes, tools, to make things better. As as with anything, people will prefer water paint, or crayons, or whatever – it simply does not matter. What matters is the ability to make great tools. Imagine if we treated music the same way we do with programming languages. It’s not hard to imagine bizarre conversations like:

  • “What, you play piano? Why, how are you going to play on the streets? The streets is where you earn money, don’t you know?”
  • “Wait, why are you learning guitar? How are you going to play on an orchestra?”
  • “Ocean Drums? Why invent another percursion instrument?”

Sounds crazy, right? So, just read this tweet, and see the madness appearing. Maybe the way that Robert Martin posed the question was not the best way to convince people to try Clojure, but anyway, people jumped up on defense of their pallets, their tools, to the point it was quite tiring, really. I’ll not post who told what, and I’m not going to post the exact replies, but let’s debunk some myths:
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

My 2020 retrospective

As my therapist said: 2020 was a year that put brakes on the whole world. And yet, for me, it was one of the best years of my life by far – maybe with the exception of 2012, where lots of other wonderful things happened too.

On this year, my daughter was born. There was also the covid-19 pandemic (yeah, it’s obvious right now, but maybe some years from now someone reading this post will probably not remember that it did exist) so if you join these two things, you’ll see how worried I was. It was always my wife’s dream to be a mother, and to have me at her side on the delivery room, but because of the pandemic, this would not be possible… or would it?

At that time, I was still living in Brazil. There are laws over there for the expecting mother to have someone helping her on the birth process – and we did use these laws so the hospital would be forced to accept that I would be with her. They tried to persuade me to not do it, multiple times, until I was able to get the maternity’s director cellphone and talk to her. So, yes – I was there, saw my daughter born, and I was with my wife’s and my daughter the whole time! It was probably the most incredible, magic moment of my life: when my daughter was born, she stayed with us the whole time, dimmed lights, looking at us. Recognizing us. She kept biting my fingers (when my wife had to rest for a while), and even today (she’s 6 months now) it’s one of her most enjoyable actions: to grab my fingers and gently bite then.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago

My Atom editor configuration for working with Clojure/Script, revisited

Sometime ago, I did a post on how I work with Atom to develop Clojure and ClojureScript projects. It is in Portuguese, so I’m gonna re-visit the subject and also update with my current workflow.

There are two packages that I have to install to work with Clojure: lisp-paredit and chlorine. Without lisp-paredit, when I start a newline, the indentation gets all sorts of problematic. I use it on “strict mode” and use the tools to slurp/barf forward only. As for chlorine, it is needed to have autocomplete, evaluation, show documentation, goto var definition and so on. Last, I use also parinfer so I can remove whole lines of text and parinfer will infer the correct closing of parenthesis for me (most of the time at least).

Now, how exactly do I work with Clojure? When you use lein or boot, you’ll get a nREPL port. This is not the port you use with Chlorine, so I need a bit more of work. I can’t just start a REPL with lein repl or clj, I need to inform the tool to open a socket-repl server. The JVM option needed is: '-Dclojure.server.myrepl={:port,5555,:accept,clojure.core.server/repl}'. So, the commands below are what I use with lein or clj:

JAVA_OPTS='-Dclojure.server.myrepl={:port,5555,:accept,clojure.core.server/repl}' lein repl

or

clj -J'-Dclojure.server.myrepl={:port,5555,:accept,clojure.core.server/repl}'

This will open a REPL at port 5555 (or I can change the port if necessary). Then, it’s time to fire up the Atom’s command palette and select “Connect Clojure Socket REPL”, put 5555 on the port, and connect. Then, I’ll use “Refresh Namespaces” or “Load file” command to load my latest version of code into the REPL, and start working.
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By Maurício Szabo, ago