Repo: https://github.com/mhuebert/maria
ClojureD talk introducing Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4
Description of 2022 grant work: http://blog.maria.cloud/2022/09/30/Maria-and-Clojurists-Toge...
I'll be posting updates to twitter, @mhuebert.
Happy to answer any questions / hear ideas for improvement & extension.
I've always felt like the lisp family could be a potentially killer educational language, with clojure being a good pick for its focus on functional ideas while being a bit more concise (and practical (looking at scheme)) than some other lisps.
Typically, most programmers start out with an imperative language and then eventually learn a functional language. I've wondered what it would be like to learn programming from scratch starting from key functional concepts like lists, map/fold/filter, recursion, and first class functions.
This kind of drawing program also has the benefit of making it simpler to explain some of the benefits of lisp-like languages specifically, in the sense of "wow i'm typing s-exps of the same structure a whole lot, I wonder if i could make it more elegant to type some how" -> macros.
Clojure has one of the heavier installation procedures, with its dependency on java. Plus, getting a decent repl environment takes at the very least installing rlwrap, and at the most emacs and CIDER. On that note, does anybody know of an all-in-one, simple, repl-focused, lightweight clojure IDE, like the IDLE for Python?
CLJS is looking pretty optimal. I only just played around with Maria, but it seems like a really friendly environment, especially the helpfully named functions, autocomplete, and of course the repl. It's overall super polished, 100% already rivals pygame and logo as educational tools which were super fun for me when I started programming.
* Just found this! https://4clojure.oxal.org/ Yess
Fwiw, Travis CI never bothered me despite its ubiquity when I got into software dev. It's not really "random contexts". The context of whether someone is talking about me or CI is actually quite clear. It's 1000x more confusing when someone else shares your name in the office.
In fact I might call my next project Karen. Because things can only get better for her.
(Spoiler: It's mostly men.)
AI Personal assistants on the other hand do seem to have feminine names or voices.
Other than that, Maria is also a male name although not very common.
~50% of humans are female and if there is a „trend“ for giving female names to software, yes, please do it more.
It’s new in the sense that I keep noticing them more often lately.
I've been wanting to take https://lambda.quest in a similar direction. Interactive tutorials are the future!
