Fork me on GitHub
Slack Archive

This page is not created by, affiliated with, or supported by Slack Technologies, Inc.

2021-06-18

Channels

#off-topic
<
2021-06-18
>
Eric Auld15:06:42

I often hear Clojurians refer to the term leverage, as if it has special meaning to the community. Is there a canonical talk(s) or article(s) I can read to learn about the special flavor this word has for Clojurians? Of course I understand the usual meaning.

👍 2
scriptor16:06:02

Do you have an example of a clojurey usage of the word?

jjttjj16:06:25

Yeah that was the talk that came to mind when you mentioned the word

respatialized19:06:37

"https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/DeconstructingTheDatabase.md" also has a discussion of leverage: "Then eventually we had things we called databases, and those databases did something that the file systems did not. They gave you leverage over the information that they were storing. They knew something about what was being stored. They imparted some sort of organization to what was being stored, so that when you wanted to find something specific, or get an answer to a particular question, there was some leverage to apply beyond: well just go look at every single byte in the thing, and figure it out. And it is that leverage that makes something a database. So when we talk about storing this state, I think we want to talk about storing the state in a way that is organized such that we can get leverage. And I would characterize query as leverage."

dpsutton15:06:54

That term doesn't stand out to me as anything special relating to Clojure. Interested to hear if others hear anything specific

Alex Miller (Clojure team)16:06:03

I don't think there is any special meaning but people in the Clojure community are probably more interested in maximizing value per effort than other language communities (imho)

💯 11
emilaasa19:06:25

That's the most eloquent way I've been called lazy in a while 😉

🙂 3
Thomas Moerman19:06:29

Economy of expression is important. I recently tried to read a java code base. I gave up, couldn't figure out where the algorithm I was looking for was hidden. Ain't nobody got time for that :face_with_hand_over_mouth: ok it's friday stop ranting, Tom. 🙈

sova-soars-the-sora23:06:11

I remember reading a research paper back in 2008 about how "the amount of code a coder can see at once greatly determines comprehension" -- so if you can see more of the program at once you can follow it better. Makes sense... maybe why some people turn their monitors from widescreen to portrait.

👍 3
💯 3
Thomas Moerman07:06:22

Makes a ton of sense. If you factor in fatigue, which impacts short term memory, then the last thing you want is having to zoom around in different class files trying to mentally puzzle together an algorithm.

mauricio.szabo13:06:03

I just felt exactly this pain - I was trying to understand Tuprolog's code. Is insanity - lots and lots of file that do nothing, just delegate some data to other function...

borkdude19:06:12

Someone on Twitter once compared Clojure with David (as in, the man who beat Goliath with a slingshot). Using the simple, small tool (relatively) that Clojure is, there can be a lots accomplished, "beating the averages".

respatialized19:06:37

"https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/DeconstructingTheDatabase.md" also has a discussion of leverage: "Then eventually we had things we called databases, and those databases did something that the file systems did not. They gave you leverage over the information that they were storing. They knew something about what was being stored. They imparted some sort of organization to what was being stored, so that when you wanted to find something specific, or get an answer to a particular question, there was some leverage to apply beyond: well just go look at every single byte in the thing, and figure it out. And it is that leverage that makes something a database. So when we talk about storing this state, I think we want to talk about storing the state in a way that is organized such that we can get leverage. And I would characterize query as leverage."