During the first few days of the new year at university, some freshmen told me about their first course given by Professor Erik Duval (One of my former professors). Apparently professor Duval was completely amazed by the fact that there was not a single student with a laptop or tablet instead of plain old paper. I don’t think that was a coincidence. Laptops and tablets are just not quite fit (yet?) to really replace paper. However, I’ve had a surprisingly pleasing experience when studying on a tablet last year.
The KU Leuven needs an API
I’ve been a student at the KU Leuven for almost three years now. My university delivers
various online services on our online “interactive” “learning” environment called Toledo.
These services include our daily schedule, exams, email, course documents, information, discussion groups. A lot of students (including this one) moan a lot about how Toledo is slow and user-unfriendly. If Toledo is ever to be redesigned, I have some suggestions.
Belgian Clojure Meetup – 27 March 2013 – Mechelen
A few weeks ago I announced that I started working on a new exciting project: organising the first ever Clojure meetup in belgium.
This week I’m very pleased to announce that I actually have been able to pull it off with the help of Frederik De Bleser & Wim De Clercq.
Belgium Clojure Meetup
This semester I have a new exciting project to work on. With some people already working in the industry (Frederik De Bleser & Wim De Clercq) I’m making plans to organise a Clojure meetup.
What is Clojure?
In short,
Clojure is a fairly new programming language with a lot of interesting ideas. It is a “modern LISP” that runs on the JVM. It’s main focus is functional programming, but nevertheless it remains pragmatic and allows you to use imperative style where it is more natural to do so. Some of the more interesting concepts (though not necessarily unique to Clojure) are: Its concurrency idioms, multimethods, its definition and usage of state / value / identity, Software Transactional Memory. Though these topic are quite significant, they’re just a small subset of what Clojure is all about.
It has a wonderful community and hence it would be even more wonderful for everyone to be able to meet each other in real life and sharing all their interesting and exciting Clojure related experiences.
Meetup?
A meetup is all about sharing experiences and ideas. Maybe having some sessions and just plain informal chatting.
The idea of a meetup is not new. There are plenty examples out there: Amsteram, London, Cambridge. But not Belgium. At least until now!
When?
We are still in a brainstorming-phase meaning that everything is still possible (location, date, content) so ideas and advice are welcome at all time.
Extra information?
You can read about our intents on the mailing list. If you are interested please leave a comment.
You can keep up-to-date with the latest developments by following us on twitter @belgiumclj
Exploring clojure: dynamic typing
While exploring Clojure I came – for the first time – in contact with a dynamically typed language. I had and still have some issues to understand how one can write robust code with a dynamically typed language. My lack of understanding most probably comes from the fact that my only real experience lies in java. It has only been 3 (extremely exciting) months that I made my first babysteps out of my comfort zone. With an ever more hunger for learning about new technologies and languages. So I tried to assemble some opinions on dynamically typed languages and put some ofmine into it as well.
fUnix: Enhancing the linux terminal by thinking functional
For over a month now I’ve been experimenting with a totally new concept to me: functional programming. I’m not going to go deeper into what it is (that’s for another blogpost) so sorry for those who don’t know it yet.
The language I used to take these first steps is ‘Clojure’ (a language with a lisp-like syntax) which I really start loving. In fact I like it so much that I want to be able to control my unix machine with a similar syntax. And this is exactly what my goal is with this new project. Clojure syntax for using the linux terminal!
Read more
Typing: Dynamic vs Static & Strong vs Weak
Recently (read: today) I got quite confused in separating the concepts of Dynamic vs Static and Strong vs Weak typed languages.
So I took the time to figure it out for myself.
Later I thought It would be nice to just quickly (and shortly) write down the key differences between them.
Working at Commsquare (1): Design Patterns
In this series of articles I talk about all the new and fancy stuff I learned about during my Student Job at Commsquare
This article tackles a quite important topic in software design: Design Patterns.
I will briefly go through some of the patterns that I used and make some notes on the dangers in using patterns.
You might want to read part 0: Introduction before reading this article.
Thomas Goossens' Blog 