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[46]The best things and stuff of 2024
Dec 23, 2024
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No
particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
also: see the lists from [47]2023, [48]2022, [49]2021, [50]2020, [51]2019, [52]
2018, [53]2017, [54]2016, [55]2015, [56]2014, [57]2013, [58]2012, [59]2011 and
[60]2010
Great posts | articles | talks read/watched
• [61]ELITE: The game that couldnt be written from Alexander the ok Elite
was one of my favorite games on my Commodore 64 1,000,000 years ago and so
Im a sucker for articles on this gem. If youre interested, also check out
[62]the annotated C64 source code. ^[63]1
• [64]The Rich History of Ham Radio Culture by Kristen Haring I missed out
on the Ham radio craze and only recently learned about its rich history.
This article is a good overview and starting point if youre interested in
learning too.
• [65]Get to Know Your Japanese Bathroom Ghosts by Eric Grundhauser
Describes the interesting Japanese cultural folklore around bathroom
ghosts.
• [66]The History of WordStar by Abort Retry Fail LLC A great historical
article about one of the most influential software suites ever created.
Additionally, the comments are a goldmine of additional information and
corrections and should not be skipped.
• [67]Combinatory Programming by zdsmith Describes combinatorial
programming using motivated examples — a technique thats surprisingly
scarce in articles about the topic.
• [68]Philip K. Dicks Favorite Classical Music by Open Culture Discusses
PKDs love for classical music and the references to composers and their
works in his fiction. The post also, includes an [69]11-hour classical
music playlist for your listening pleasure.
• [70]Goodbye, Kory by Andy Looney The world lost Kory Heath, a game
designer whom I admire immensely. Ive talked about his magnum opus [71]
Zendo on this blog before and have run numerous play sessions over the
years. He was single-handedly responsible for hundreds of hours of
enjoyment around my home and within my group of friends. The world is much
the poorer without him in it. RIP. ^[72]2
Most viewed blog posts by me
• [73]On method values, part 1 We released Clojure 1.12.0 this year and so
I wanted to write about one of the features that I worked on. Method values
are symbolic references to Java methods that can be used in value contexts
and the design and implementation of this feature was interesting enough to
talk about. The feature has been generally well received by the Clojure
community.
Favorite technical (and technical-adjacent) books discovered (and read)
• [74]And so FORTH by Timothy Huang I found this long out of print Forth
tome via inter library loan and enjoyed it immensely. Its a nice blend of
the ideas in Brodies [75]Thinking Forth and something like Geeres [76]
Forth: The Next Step. It was a sad day when I had to return this beauty
back to the library because I could have used another read or two at least.
• [77]BASIC and FORTH in Parallel by S.J. Wainwright This style of book is
exactly the kind of book that I would one day like to write. While the
specifics of any such book would be different, the central conceit is
perfect. That is, this book uses BASIC to create a simple stack machine and
Forth interpreter and then presents simple Forth programs exercising them.
Favorite non-technical books read
• [78]Butchers Crossing by John Williams Follows Harvard drop-out Will
Andrews as he escapes to the American frontier with a wad of cash to find
adventure and “an original relation to nature”. Andrews eventually finds
Miller who is more than happy to help the young man part with his money in
an attempt to find a hidden Colorado valley filled with buffalo that may or
may not still (if it ever did) exist. The book follows Miller and Andrews
(plus a skinner Schneider and driver Hoge) trek throw the frontier and
describes in harrowing detail their tribulations. I could not stop reading
and finished the book in a weekend. This one demands multiple reads to
really absorb the nuance.
• [79]The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti Contains two stories by Ligotti:
“Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People”. The first is quite different
than most of Ligottis work that Ive read so far. It follows a
self-described “metaphysical mutant” and blends overtly dark humor with an
underlying pessimistic philosophy centered on a theme of euthanasia. “The
Small People” is a dream-like exploration of paranoia and isolation. Both
stories are a good introduction to the range in Ligottis work if youre
interested in checking him out.
• [80]The Corvo Cult by Robert Scoble Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo) was
an little-known Edwardian author who is often remembered more for his
bombastic personality than his fictional works. This book talks about the
rise and growth of the still active “Corvo Cult” — an obscure literary
fandom. In many cases, Rolfes fervid devotees matched the controversial
author in eccentricity, but the true fascination lies in the broad range of
people drawn to his eclectic works.
Number of books written or published
0
Number of programming languages designed
0.5
Favorite music discovered
• [81]The Paragons At some point I became interested in the roots of ska
and The Paragons were the best group that I discovered during my
explorations.
• [82]Thats All! by Sammy Davis Jr. *A fantastic performance from a master
of the vocal form. The songs are brilliant but the banter between songs
will keep me listening into the distant future.
Favorite films discovered
• [83]Withnail & I [84]Sam Aaron recommended this film to me years ago but
I only managed to watch it in 2024. Its a great example of a dry comedy
following a couple of screw-ups and their misadventures.
• [85]Jodorowskys Dune A documentary about the most influential film that
never was.
• [86]Requiem for a Dream Im probably the last person in the world to
watch this relentless survey of despair. Not for the faint of heart.
Favorite podcasts
• [87]Will Radio Will Byrd started the year promising a KiloTube of videos
(i.e. 1024 videos) in 2024 and its been a blast following along! Theres
no one quite like Will and so any chance that I can get to experience more
of him I will jump on.
• [88]Eros + Massacre Another podcast triumph by Samm Deighan surveying the
weird world of psychotronic cinema.
Favorite programming languages (or related) I hacked on/with on my own time
• [89]Joy Joy is a mindfrak of a programming language in the concatenative
functional language family. The core of Joy is beautiful and among the
foundational programming languages in my opinion.
• [90]Forth Sticking with the concatenative family in 2024, I continued to
explore Forth. Interestingly the language is incredibly rich in history and
conducive to a wide range of techniques and paradigms. Im unsure if Ill
ever find the opportunity to use Forth in anger, but I will say that I
should come out of my explorations a stronger programmer and program
designer.
Programming languages used for work-related projects
• [91]Java Working deep in the Clojure compiler means that much of my work
in 2024 was in Java.
• [92]Clojure 2024 marks the 15th year^[93]3 as a full-time Clojure
programmer and the 1st year as a full-time Clojure core developer.
• [94]ClojureScript Less-so now than when I was consulting full-time but I
occasionally dig into explore the implications of changes to Clojure on
CLJS.
• [95]Datalog The [96]Datomic flavor of Datalog is the flavor of choice for
database access, be it in-process or in the cloud. Again, my day-to-day
usage is limited, but I have my share of personal databases hosted on
Datomic.
Programming languages (and related) that I hope to explore more deeply
• [97]Joy Theres a mountain of deep information on Joy that I would like
to devour in 2025.^[98]4
• [99]Mouse Yet another concatenative language to explore thats long-dead
but still has some lessons to teach one such as myself.
• [100]POP-11 Another dead language that was designed to support AI
applications in the 70s and 80s. I love the idea of exploring the language
and the suite of applications that built up around it.
Favorite papers discovered (and read)
• [101]Recursion Theory and Joy by Manfred von Thun Joys underlying
reliance on combanatory programming manifests deep in the language even to
the degree that recursion in the language is implemented in userspace via
recursive combinators. This paper describes the “Joy Way” and its
relationship to recursion.
• [102]A Simple Applicative Language: Mini-ML (PDF) by D. Clement and J.
Despeyroux and T. Despeyroux and G. Kahn Presents a beautiful definition
of ML language and its compilation to an abstract machine.
Still havent read…
I Ching, A Fire upon the Deep, Don Quixote, and [103]a boat-load of sci-fi
Favorite technical conference attended
• [104]Clojure/conj 2024 This was the first Clojure conference that I
played a somewhat active part in organizing. Let me be clear, my part in
the matter was minimal at best, but it did provide me a window into the
complexities of organizing a conference. The conference itself was a blast
and it was great to meet old and new Clojure friends as well as [105]
colleagues!
Favorite code read
• [106]Restrained Datalog in 39loc by Christophe Grande Ive learned over
the years that if Christophe writes a technical article then it behooves me
to study it deeply. The highlight of the year from Christophe was his
simple, yet rich, Datalog implementation in 39 lines of Clojure code. Its
clear that 39 lines of Clojure goes a long way and especially so when a
master of the language plays in it.
• [107]Post-Apocalyptic Programming by Serge Zaitsev I love the central
conceit of the post, summarized as “what technology could/should we create
in the absence of modern computing niceties?” The post starts with a CPU
emulator, builds a language for it, and motives its decisions along the
way. Theres a brilliant hard science fiction story in here somewhere, I
can feel it.
• [108]MINT MINT is highly inspirational to me as a lesson in minimal
programming language design. Based on Forth, MINT makes various design
decisions and trade-offs to remain small and fast.
Life-changing technology “discovered”
Nothing this year.
State of plans from 2023
• Clojure 1.12 Released in [109]early September and one of the biggest
releases in years as far as feature additions go.
• Go much deeper down the concatenative rabbit-hole An unmitigated success!
• Publish even more non-technical writing My research into the
Corvo-related archives stored at Georgetown University was a success.
However, my efforts in writing up my findings has stalled.
Plans for 2025
• [110]Clojure 1.13 Thinking around the 1.13 release is ongoing and wed
like to get it out sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.
• [111]clojure.core.async next Weve laid the groundwork for a new version
of core.async and released it as version 1.7.701. Wed love to leverage JDK
21+ virtual threads to vastly simplify core.asyncs implementation and have
started along this path in earnest.
• [112]Simplify my blog Id love to move away from WordPress in 2025.
• [113]Juxt Juxt is my exploration in functional concatenative language
design built on the JVM. Its not yet clear to me if or when I would ever
release this into the wild, but the explorations have been great fun and
Ive used Juxt as a vehicle for finding relevant books and papers.^[114]5
That said, most of my programming time is spent maintaining and evolving
Clojure, but there are rare moments of time that I can spend on Juxt, and I
plan to continue to do so in 2025.
[115][juxt-274x300]
2024 Tech Radar
• try: [116]Boox Go 10.3 tablet recommended by many colleagues
• adopt: [117]Blank Spaces app helps to avoid phone brain-drain
• assess: [118]TypeScript What does it buy me over JS?
• hold: [119]Zig This looks like a dead-end for me
• stop: [120]Joy of Clojure 3rd edition Another edition is unlikely but
hopefully something else may come of this work… this is an evolving
situation.
People who inspired me in 2024 (in no particular order)
Yuki, Keita, Shota, Craig Andera, Carin Meier, Justin Gehtland, Rich Hickey,
Nick Bentley, Paula Gearon, Zeeshan Lakhani, Brian Goetz, David Nolen, Jeb
Beich, Paul Greenhill, Kristin Looney, Andy Looney, Kurt Christensen, Samm
Deighan, David Chelimsky, Chas Emerick, Stacey Abrams, Paul deGrandis, Nada
Amin, Michiel Borkent, Alvaro Videla, Slava Pestov, Yoko Harada, Mike Fikes,
Dan De Aguiar, Christian Romney, Russ Olsen, Alex Miller, Adam Friedman, Tracie
Harris, Alan Kay, Janet A. Carr, Wayne Applewhite, Naoko Higashide, Zach
Tellman, Nate Prawdzik, Bobbi Towers, JF Martel, Phil Ford, Nate Hayden, Sean
Ross, Tim Good, Chris Redinger, Steve Jensen, Jordan Miller, Tim Ewald, Stu
Halloway, Jack Rusher, Michael Berstein, Benoît Fleury, Rafael Ferreira, Robert
Randolph, Joe Lane, Renee Lee, Pedro Matiello, Jarrod Taylor, Jaret Binford,
Ailan Batista, Matheus Machado, Quentin S. Crisp, John Cooper, Conrad Barski,
Amabel Holland, Ben Kamphaus, Barry Malzberg (RIP), Kory Heath (RIP).
Onward to 2025!
:F
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
1. I also recommend and excellent YT video [121]“The Making of ELITE”. [122]↩
2. Dave Chalker also wrote about Kory on his blog at “[123]Remembering the
Master: An Inelegant Eulogy for Kory Heath“. [124]↩
3. This is strictly my work-life time. My total use of Clojure has been
longer. [125]↩
4. Sadly the death of Manfred von Thun brought the death of Joy with it. The
literature the language is indeed deep but its finite and has stopped
growing entirely. I would like to help fix this stagnation if I can in
2025. [126]↩
5. You can see the current [127]Juxt bibtex on Github. [128]↩
Related posts:
1. [129]The best things and stuff of 2023
2. [130]Goodbye Sir Arthur Clarke
3. [131]The best things and stuff of 2012
No Comments, [132]Comment or [133]Ping
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References:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Functional-JavaScript-Introducing-Programming-Underscore-js/dp/1449360726/?tag=fogus-20
[2] http://www.joyofclojure.com/buy
[3] http://www.joyofclojure.com/
[4] https://blog.fogus.me/
[5] http://fogus.me/me/
[6] http://fogus.me/static/
[7] http://fogus.me/fun
[8] http://blog.fogus.me/linkage/
[9] https://github.com/search?q=username%3Afogus+language%3Ac
[10] https://github.com/search?q=username%3Afogus+language%3Aclojure
[11] https://www.erlang.org/
[12] https://www.swi-prolog.org/
[13] http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/
[14] https://colorforth.github.io/
[15] http://www.cons.org/
[16] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
[17] https://agraef.github.io/pure-lang/
[18] https://clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean
[19] http://shenlanguage.org/
[20] http://www.twitter.com/fogus
[21] http://blog.fogus.me/feed/
[22] http://blog.fogus.me/index.php?wptheme=Carrington+Mobile
[23] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/
[24] https://blog.fogus.me/2023/
[25] https://blog.fogus.me/2022/
[26] https://blog.fogus.me/2021/
[27] https://blog.fogus.me/2020/
[28] https://blog.fogus.me/2019/
[29] https://blog.fogus.me/2018/
[30] https://blog.fogus.me/2017/
[31] https://blog.fogus.me/2016/
[32] https://blog.fogus.me/2015/
[33] https://blog.fogus.me/2014/
[34] https://blog.fogus.me/2013/
[35] https://blog.fogus.me/2012/
[36] https://blog.fogus.me/2011/
[37] https://blog.fogus.me/2010/
[38] https://blog.fogus.me/2009/
[39] https://blog.fogus.me/2008/
[40] https://blog.fogus.me/2007/
[41] https://blog.fogus.me/2006/
[42] https://blog.fogus.me/2005/
[43] https://blog.fogus.me/2004/
[44] https://blog.fogus.me/2003/
[45] https://blog.fogus.me/2002/
[46] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/
[47] https://blog.fogus.me/2023/12/18/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2023/
[48] http://blog.fogus.me/2022/12/13/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2022/
[49] https://blog.fogus.me/2021/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2021/
[50] http://blog.fogus.me/2020/12/31/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2020/
[51] http://blog.fogus.me/2019/12/30/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2019/
[52] http://blog.fogus.me/2019/01/02/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2018/
[53] http://blog.fogus.me/2018/01/02/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2017/
[54] http://blog.fogus.me/2016/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2016/
[55] http://blog.fogus.me/2015/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2015/
[56] http://blog.fogus.me/2014/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2014/
[57] http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2013/
[58] http://blog.fogus.me/2012/12/26/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2012/
[59] http://blog.fogus.me/2011/12/31/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2011/
[60] http://blog.fogus.me/2010/12/30/the-best-things-in-2010/
[61] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I
[62] https://elite.bbcelite.com/c64/
[63] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:elite
[64] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-rich-history-of-ham-radio-culture/
[65] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japans-bathroom-ghosts
[66] https://www.abortretry.fail/p/arrogant-difficult-powerful
[67] https://blog.zdsmith.com/series/combinatory-programming.html
[68] https://www.openculture.com/2014/05/philip-k-dicks-favorite-classical-music.html
[69] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1RsnkX0bQWd2CVWW8jcxBR
[70] https://new.wunderland.com/2024/11/20/goodbye-kory/
[71] https://blog.fogus.me/2014/10/23/games-of-interest-zendo/
[72] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:chalker
[73] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/08/19/on-method-values-part-1/
[74] https://books.google.com/books/about/And_So_FORTH.html?id=iqUZAQAAIAAJ
[75] https://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
[76] https://archive.org/details/forth-the-next-step-ron-geere
[77] https://www.amazon.com/BASIC-FORTH-Parallel-S-J-Wainwright/dp/0859341135?tag=fogus-20
[78] https://www.amazon.com/Butchers-Crossing-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171985/?tag=fogus-20
[79] https://www.amazon.com/Spectral-Link-Thomas-Ligotti-ebook/dp/B00LE52256/?tag=fogus-20
[80] https://www.amazon.com/Corvo-Cult-History-Obsession-2014-10-09/dp/B01FIY47AQ/?tag=fogus-20
[81] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TI2FfqGJ8&pp=ygUOInRoZSBwYXJhZ29ucyI%3D
[82] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_All!
[83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withnail_and_I
[84] http://sam.aaron.name/
[85] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
[86] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Dream
[87] https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamEByrd
[88] https://cinepunx.com/podcast-episodes/eros-massacre/
[89] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html
[90] https://www.forth.com/forth/
[91] https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/2023-December/003959.html
[92] http://www.clojure.org/
[93] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:15th
[94] http://www.clojurescript.org/
[95] http://www.datomic.com/
[96] https://www.datomic.com/
[97] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html
[98] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:joy
[99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(programming_language)
[100] https://poplogarchive.getpoplog.org/poplog.info.html
[101] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/html/j05cmp.html
[102] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/dominique-clement/applicative.pdf
[103] http://blog.fogus.me/2012/09/21/the-amazing-colossal-science-fiction-ketchup/
[104] https://2024.clojure-conj.org/
[105] https://www.nubank.com/
[106] https://buttondown.com/tensegritics-curiosities/archive/restrained-datalog-in-39loc/
[107] https://zserge.com/posts/post-apocalyptic-programming/
[108] https://github.com/monsonite/MINT
[109] https://clojure.org/news/2024/09/05/clojure-1-12-0
[110] https://www.clojure.org/
[111] https://github.com/clojure/core.async
[112] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/
[113] https://gist.github.com/fogus/6d716276678b0698c96dd13e040c71eb
[114] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:juxtbib
[115] https://blog.fogus.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/juxt.jpg
[116] https://www.amazon.com/BOOX-Tablet-Go-10-3-ePaper/dp/B0D4DFT3W3/?tag=fogus-20
[117] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blank-spaces-launcher/id1570856853
[118] https://www.typescriptlang.org/
[119] https://ziglang.org/
[120] https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Clojure-Michael-Fogus/dp/1617291412/?tag=fogus-20
[121] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWoF5uVgbA&t=529s
[122] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:elite
[123] https://critical-hits.com/blog/2024/11/20/remembering-the-master-an-inelegant-eulogy-for-kory-heath/
[124] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:chalker
[125] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:15th
[126] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:joy
[127] https://gist.github.com/fogus/6d716276678b0698c96dd13e040c71eb
[128] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:juxtbib
[129] https://blog.fogus.me/2023/12/18/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2023/
[130] https://blog.fogus.me/2008/03/19/goodbye-sir-arthur-clarke/
[131] https://blog.fogus.me/2012/12/26/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2012/
[132] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#respond
[133] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/trackback/
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[139] http://tomayko.com/
[140] https://blog.fogus.me/wp-login.php
[141] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#top