Posted by Matt on May 21, 2010

RailsConf / May Update

June is quickly approaching and that means one thing… RailsConf. This will be the first professional conference I’ve ever attended and I’m extremely excited for it. I will be taking in the Mobile App Development Studio from Mike Clark and the Rails 3 Ropes Course from the guys at Envy Labs.

I’ve spent most of my time recently working in Cocoa (which I love) and haven’t been able to devote the time I’ve wanted to Rails. I’ve only scratched the surface of Rails 3 but I’m extremely excited for templates. I will happily be dumping ActiveRecord and ERB for DataMapper (maybe CouchRest as well?) and HAML.

I’ve put learning Scala on hiatus for a little while. I’ve started learning Clojure instead. I’ve always had a bit of a hard time with LISP based languages. However, I think I get Clojure’s implementation of it a lot better. I’m using Programming Clojure by Stuart Holloway as my guide. It’s actually a lot of fun when you get into it. I’m still however having trouble reading my own code after not touching it for a few days. All of the parenthesis can be a bit hard to grok.

Here is an example of generating a Fibonacci sequence then summing all even numbers found. This is a potential solution to Project Euler Problem No. 2

#!/usr/bin/env clj

(defn fib

  “Fibbonacci sequence for numbers greater than 2”

  [n]

  ((fn

    [max, sequence]    

    (let [sequenceCount (count sequence) firstIndex (- sequenceCount 1) secondIndex (- sequenceCount 2) 

newFibNumber (+ (sequence firstIndex) (sequence secondIndex))]

    (if (> newFibNumber max)

      sequence

      (recur max (conj sequence newFibNumber))))) 

      n [1 1]))
(println (reduce + (filter #(= (rem % 2) 0) (fib 4000000))))

If you want to more about Clojure, definately check out the Programming Clojure book or the Clojure Peepcode Screencast