The Bay Area Clojure user group threw a special JavaOne special, with Rich Hickey as special guest on Wednesday afternoon. I went there and it turned out to be a large collection of former and current ThoughtWorkers there, among all the other Clojure enthusiasts. The model was lightning talks for a while and then general town hall with Rich answering questions. The reality turned out to be a bit different – firstly because people spent quite long on their talks, and people asked many questions and so on. The second problem was that the projector in the place had some serious problems – which basically ended up resulting in everyone projecting pink tinted presentations.

There were several interesting talks. The first one took a look at what the Clojure compiler actually generates. This turned a bit funny when Rich chimed in and basically said “that doesn’t look right” – the presenter had simplified some of what was happening. I don’t envy the presenter in this case, but it all turned into good fun, and I think we all learned a bit about what Clojure does during compilation.

There was a longer talk about something called Swarmli, which was a very small distributed computing network, written in about 300 lines of code. I defocused during that talk since I had to hack some stuff in Ioke.

After that, one of the JetBrains guys showed up the new IntelliJ Clojure plugin. It seems to be quite early days for it still, but there is potential to get good cross language refactoring, joint compilation and other goodies there.

Finally, my colleague Bradford Cross did a very cool talk about some of the work he’s currently doing at a startup. The work seems to be perfectly suited for Clojure, and the code shown was very clear and simple. Very cool stuff, really. ThoughtWorks – actually using Clojure at client projects. Glad to see that.

After that it was time for Rich Hickey. Rich decided to give a lightning talk himself – about chunked sequences. Very cool in concept, but actually one of those ideas that seem very simple and evident after the fact. Chunked sequences really seems to promise even better Clojure performance in many cases – without even requiring changes to client code.

After that there was a general Q&A session, where questions ranged all over the map, from personal to professional. One of the more conentious things said was about Rich’s attitude to testing. This caused lots of discussions later in the evening.

All in all, this was really a great event. We ended up at a nearby bar/restaurant afterwards and had long discussions about programming languages. A great evening.

By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: clojure, javaone, presentations, san francisco. | #