FYI: I rewatched Rich's talk recently, Design, Composition, and Performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCZ3YgeEUPg&ab_channel=ZhangJian (I think it was on HN) In this talk, he compares programming languages to instruments. And makes the point that making them easy to learn is not the point. Making them useful for the experienced person is. That kind of hints that clojure isnt especially focused on the beginner... Perhaps logo or (god forbid BASIC?) are good "starter languages" or Scratch?

It might be worth noting that there were a lot of musical instruments in history which never became mainstream because they were too darn impractical or hard too learn.

Clojure faces another hurdle in that being hosted, it presumes you know the host system as well.

it's like playing in an orchestra where it makes sense to know a little bit about the other instruments

analogies only go so far :)

I am having a terrible time trying to locate a clojure talk. It's a vague memory... Posting here to hopefully trigger someone's memory. If I remember correctly: the speaker takes a piece of clojure code and refactors it 3 or 4 times with the final version being a functional pipeline where there is a single try-catch wrapper to deal with errors in one place. I believe the majority of the talk is a demonstration in a REPL, and pretty sure it was a male speaker... I think it was hosted on youtube (where is the semantic web??)

I've been trying to learn Mortal Kombat, and I found a spreadsheet of detailed move data for all characters, turns out clojure is a great way to query datasets who knew

user=> (->> moves (filter (comp #{"Kombo Attacks"} #(get % "category"))) (map #(select-keys % ["move_name" "notation"])) clojure.pprint/print-table)                                                                      
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
|        move_name |  notation |                                                                                                                                                                                      
|------------------+-----------|                                                                                                                                                                                                              
|    Yellow Jacket |       y,x |                                                                                                                                                                                                              
|      Black Widow |     y,x,y |                                                                                                                                                                           
|          Bot Fly |     ⇨+y,b |                                                                                                                                                                                                 
|     Assassin Bug |       x,y |                                                                                                                                                                                                 
| Wandering Spider | x,y,x,x,x |                                                                                                                                                                               
|            Siafu |     ⇨+x,x |                                                                                                                                                                   
|      Bugging Out |   ⇨+x,x,a |                                                                                                                                                                                                            
|       Killer Bee |     ⇦+b,a |                                                                                                                                                                          
|          Lonomia |       a,a |                                                                                                                                                      
nil                                 

(this is after heavy preprocessing to do things like replace the notation with my consoles button names and replace F,B,U,D with actual arrows)

Man, I haven't played Mortal Kombat since the first one. It was quite something when it first came out!

with the visible "frame data" (info about startup times, active times, vulnerability on block etc.) exposed in the game UI, it becomes a very nerdy thing

then you have to actually input the things lightning fast of course

but anyone whose observed my here knows I can push buttons fast haha

great way to get fit is to do a set of pushups/squats/situps when you lose a match

yeah, it's definitely not a good game to play if you dislike losing

check out guilty gear as well, it looks pretty cool

but can you download all the timing delays, base damage, combos, block disadvantage etc. etc. in a form easily consumable by clojure?

:D

haha no idea