
Interview: Russ Olsen on "Eloquent Ruby"
The book "Eloquent Ruby" aims to help Ruby programmers to write idiomatic Ruby and make best use of Ruby's capabilities. InfoQ talked to author Russ Olsen about Ruby style, metaprogramming and more.

The book "Eloquent Ruby" aims to help Ruby programmers to write idiomatic Ruby and make best use of Ruby's capabilities. InfoQ talked to author Russ Olsen about Ruby style, metaprogramming and more.
Clojure is rather new member of the LISP family of languages which runs on the Java platform. Introduced in 2007 it has generated a lot of interest. InfoQ had a small Q&A with James Reeves and Christophe Grand, the creators of Enlive and Compojure, about their projects and their experiences working with Clojure.
Clojure 1.1 RC1 is out and cuts the overhead of functional programming with a few new constructs: transients bring controlled mutability for persistent data structures; chunked sequences make lazy sequences more efficient. InfoQ takes a look at what makes these improvements work.

InfoQ takes a look at how a combo of Clojure and Google AppEngine (GAE) powers a new online project management tool, how Clojure integrates with GAE's key/value store, and the power of LISP.

FlightCaster, a realtime flight delay site, is built on Clojure and Hadoop for the statistical analysis. The web frontend is built with Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku. We talked to Bradford Cross about Clojure, functional programming and tips for OOP developers interested in making the jump.

Guy Steele, Douglas Crockford, Josh Bloch, Alex Payne, Bruce Tate, and Ted Neward (moderator) hold a discussion on the future of programming. Topics included: the future beyond functional, running JVM/CLR on many cores, what is the future of type checking and type systems, languages for education, comparing DSLs and ubiquitous languages, proving code correctness, functional and parallelism.
Rebecca Parsons makes an basic introduction to functional languages, explaining how to think in a functional language, why is there renewed interested in them, and some nifty things about these languages.
In this interview Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, co-inventors of the Erlang language, talk about the future of the language, including its use in web programming, its ability to scale and more. The duo also discuss Erlang support for NoSQL databases, running the language on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and comparisons with other languages such as Google’s Go.
Rich Hickey explains the ideas behind Clojure 1.2's new polymorphism constructs deftype and protocols. Also: Clojure 1.3 features such as faster arithmetic and future features like Pods.