<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">My new hobby is taking graphs of economic data over time and indicating the year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in case people find that helpful or informative. <a href="https://t.co/jdLwHv8VNK">pic.twitter.com/jdLwHv8VNK</a></p>&mdash; Ward Q. Normal (@WardQNormal) <a href="https://twitter.com/WardQNormal/status/1206280031552454656?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 15, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Night City’s Chronicles_ S1 EP1 _ The beautiful stranger

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">At dawn, a gentle morning light embraced the streets of Japantown. That&#39;s when I saw her emerging from the Embers club, her silvered silhouette capturing the nascent day&#39;s glow. Her eyes sparkled with subtle elegance, her satin tunic gently shimmering in the morning light.<br><br>She… <a href="https://t.co/15VL75GKbt">pic.twitter.com/15VL75GKbt</a></p>&mdash; 🌸Iko🌸 (@Ikolovepepita) <a href="https://twitter.com/Ikolovepepita/status/1711673242795069797?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 10, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

API Development

This week I have been developing my knowledge of using APIs within my web app using the javascript Fetch API. In the small app below I have used the dictionary API (which is free, link below):

Free Dictionary API

This very basic API returns a JSON with a meaning of the world and audio snippet of how to pronounce the word. I followed along to a very good tutorial on YouTube to help build this app which is here:

(43) JavaScript Project in 5 min - English Dictionary Project #HTML, #CSS and #JavaScript - YouTube

You can see the finished product below:

As you can see this is a very good example of working with a very basic API. It basically returns a JSON object which we then turn into an iterable JS object with the .json() method. You can see a snippet of the script below:

Once we have generated an object we can point to the data within its arrays and assign it to the innerText or 'src' (audio) of the website's elements.

Some further learning required to understand exactly how this works is:

Promises

Async functions

Await

Although this is basic I plan to go to Rapid API and look through the various free APIs available and build a bigger application that requires API keys, options which are included within the API calls header.

More to follow.

A discussion of the newly released Electric Clojure by Hyperfiddle. What is Electric? "Electric Clojure, a reactive Clojure/Script dialect for web UI with compiler-managed client/server data sync." What does that mean? You write a single piece of code, e.g. a UI component function, and hint which parts need to run on the server vs. the client. "The Electric compiler performs deep graph analysis of your unified frontend/backend program to automatically determine the optimal network cut, and then compile it into separate client and server target programs that cooperate and anticipate each other's needs." Thus you program as if there was no hard client-server divide (no 2 separate files with REST calls in between) and Electric handles splitting it up and managing the communication between them on your behalf. It is groundbreaking and fascinating, with potential to significantly simplify web apps. Go read more about it.

Highlights from the discussion (many comments by the founder):

[..] we're seeing 10x LOC reduction (18k to 2k) in rebuilding Electric's sister project, Hyperfiddle (a spreadsheet like tool for robust UI development), as well as massive gains in performance.

NOTE: Til now focus was on correct program semantics, now started work on DX etc.

Our DOM module is only 300 LOC - it's bare metal DOM point writes + Electric (reactive language) + macros for JSX-y syntax. When the programming language itself is reactive, DOM rendering falls out for free.

Mechanically, Electric is comparable to Solid.js except the reactive engine (missionary) is general purpose, not coupled to DOM rendering, which is a special case of incremental view maintenance.

[..] over-abstracting is a primary risk and has been top of mind for us since project conception in ~2012. [..] Electric is an attempt to find exactly the right level of abstraction. The goal is to remove and flatten layers, not add them, thus decreasing abstraction weight in the end if we succeed. Maybe we fail, but first let me share some details about how we think about this:

I've personally failed to build this project several times, Electric Clojure is something like the 7th attempt.

strong composition model as a starting point, based on category theory generalization of "function" -> "async function" -> "reactive function" -> "stream function" -> "distributed function". [..] (This rigor is in response to the past failures.)

Functional effect system (monad stuff) at the bottom, which provides strong semantics guarantees about glitch-free reactive propagation, process supervision (like Erlang) (transparent propagation of cancellation and failure), strong resource cleanup guarantees (DOM nodes can never be left hanging, event handlers can never fail to be detached and disposed). Already this results in tighter operational semantics than we have ever achieved with manual resource management (and, again, we tried, see past failures).

Electric affords the programmer trapdoors to the underlying FRP/concurrency primitives. Electric is essentially a Clojure-to-FRP compiler, so if you code raw concurrency and effect management, that actually typechecks with what Electric generates, allowing seamless transition in and out of the abstraction.

3k LOC + 3k test LOC is the size of Electric today (includes a rewrite of the Clojure analyzer). Spring Framework is, let me go check, 59k just for spring-core/src/main/java, and there are like 20 other modules I excluded. Indeed it is not a fair comparison but certainly we have complexity budget to spare.

About Missionary: "Missionary is a reactive dataflow programming toolkit providing referentially transparent operators for lazy continuous signals, eager discrete streams, and IO actions. Missionary aims to improve over state-of-the-art reactive systems, it can be used as a general-purpose asynchronous programming toolkit but also as a basis for event streaming and incremental computations." Electric uses it for functional effects and as its reactive engine.

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Mushroom Tent on Etsy