The Geek Talk

Who is Fogus?

A programmer in Northern Virginia.  I am co-authoring a book entitled The Joy of Clojure with Chris Houser.

About Clojure?

Clojure is a practical mixture of Common Lisp, Scheme, ML, Haskell, T, Java, and its own novelty situated on the JVM and CLR that has worked to resurrect the viability of using Lisp in industry.

Clojure IDE?

I personally use Emacs for my Clojure programming but I’m not an advocate for it unless you’re already familiar.  If I were to recommend one I would say to choose the IDE that you’re familiar with (Eclipse, Vi, Emacs, Netbeans, IDEA, or JEdit).

Clojure vs Scala?

I like both.  I’ve written my fair share of Scala at my job and I’ve mostly enjoyed it so far.  However, I am passionate about Clojure. Scala’s static typing has been beneficial to me and my team, but it required a lot of thought to get a rock-solid domain model fleshed out.  Lisp on the other hand is the original agile language, and I’m more productive using Clojure than any language I’ve used.

What does your typical day look like?

I wake up at 6am, get myself and the kids ready for school, and drive 15 minutes to work.  I really like my job because it affords me the opportunity to get my hands into a lot of different languages and domains while being surrounded by extremely smart programmers.  During the day I like to go for a walk and think about the problems that I’m working on.  Nothing helps more to get my head straight than a walk (except for sleeping).  When I get home in the evening I have dinner with the family and listen to my wife play piano until its time for the kids to go to bed.  After that I try to get some personal coding in and finish the day reading a book.

What do you do in your free time?

I read like an insane person.  I like to code.  I also like to go to local museums with the family.  There is a local Captial Area Clojure Users Group that holds monthly meetings that I love to attend.  Watching baseball is usually fun, but my favorite team has made that very difficult to stomach lately.

Current favorite apps?

I try not to get too reliant on any particular app or configuration — I use (mostly) default Emacs bindings for heaven’s sake.  Having said that, it’s unpleasant for me to write Clojure code without Aquamacs with clojure-mode and Paredit.  I’m perpetually on the lookout for a note-taking application better than a set of nested directories and text files (to no avail), so at this moment I’m exploring Evernote.  Thanks to Instapaper, looking at the raw Internet feels crass.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Language, JS Framework?

My favorite language is Clojure.  I am not extremely well-versed in Javascript, but I have used jQuery and liked it very much.  While it stretches the definition of framework, I’m very excited about CoffeeScript and hope to explore it further.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I attended a recent Clojure Studio with Rich Hickey and Stuart Halloway and while I had met them both previously, it was nice to have them available to answer my idiotic questions.  Their passion and intelligence was mind-blowing to say the least.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

At the moment I like full-time employment because of the team that I’m working with and the freedom that I’m given to explore.  However, in the absence of these things I would probably prefer freelance.

What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

I’m currently working on a contracts-programming framework for Clojure named Trammel that I would like to get to a 1.0 release this year.  Aside from that, I’m hoping to help advocate Clojure now and into the future.  I hate to admit it, but I’m not very skilled with regular expressions or SQL — something I would like to remedy before 2011.  I’ve always managed to get by, but these are definite deficiencies in my skill-set.