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Cameron Desautels

@camdez.com

Founder and CEO at CollBox. Emacs, Clojure, &c.—tea enthusiast, erstwhile vagabond, libertine, & over-thinker. https://camdez.com

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02.05.2023
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Latest posts by Cameron Desautels @camdez.com

…”emharbrassed”?

07.02.2026 01:47 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0


Clojure and indeed all lisp style languages are the final boss of density here though. Almost every line is an expression of business logic. I never really got into it myself, but looking at these results are starting to make me rethink that decision.

If you compare Clojure (77.91%) to C# (58.4%), it seems the average C# developer writes 20% more redundant code every single day just to satisfy the compiler. Even with tools like resharper and LLM’s to help thats not a insignificant amount of effort.

Clojure and indeed all lisp style languages are the final boss of density here though. Almost every line is an expression of business logic. I never really got into it myself, but looking at these results are starting to make me rethink that decision. If you compare Clojure (77.91%) to C# (58.4%), it seems the average C# developer writes 20% more redundant code every single day just to satisfy the compiler. Even with tools like resharper and LLM’s to help thats not a insignificant amount of effort.

The developer of a code counting tool ranked popular proglangs by density. I am not surprised that "according to the data, if you want the highest ratio of human thought to keystrokes, the winner is the 60 year old concept, Lisp running as a modern JVM language Clojure."

boyter.org/posts/boiler...

06.02.2026 19:24 👍 9 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0

A real news outlet publishing the phrase "Grok apologized" should result in like a week-long timeout. Think about what you've done.

02.01.2026 22:31 👍 8573 🔁 1235 💬 72 📌 46

Sir, this is a ウェンディーズ.

06.12.2025 22:56 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages | PNAS Explaining the variation between human languages and the constraints on that variation is a core goal of linguistics. In the last 20 y, it has been...

I believe all languages have these "stack management" challenges *somewhere* (cf. "The horse raced past the barn fell.")

The good news is that it strains us all, thus all languages (appear to) evolve to minimize dependency distance. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

09.11.2025 16:50 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Photo of two pencils. Top pencil (a Mitsu-Bishi 9000) bears the text “MADE BY ELABORATE PROCESS”.

Photo of two pencils. Top pencil (a Mitsu-Bishi 9000) bears the text “MADE BY ELABORATE PROCESS”.

I’m gonna start using this line on everything I create.

17.05.2025 03:11 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

You really do have the perfect guest. 🔥

10.05.2025 19:04 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Cheese + corn and pork floss are my jam. 😍

07.05.2025 13:15 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Screenshot of Wikipedia page for the “chip butty”, a.k.a. “chip barm”, “chip bap”, and “chip bun”.

Screenshot of Wikipedia page for the “chip butty”, a.k.a. “chip barm”, “chip bap”, and “chip bun”.

I’m perpetually amazed how much abuse the English language can take without breaking.

25.04.2025 15:01 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Totally. Always good to ship.

And I have to remind myself we aren't all advancing at the same pace / beginners are born every day.

24.04.2025 15:09 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Fixed Order Sorting in Clojure Here’s another tidy bit of Clojure that makes me happy… Of course it’s easy to sort items in the natural order: (sort [1 3 4 2]) ; => (1 2 3 4) Or via a mapping to elements that sort in a natural orde...

More Clojure bits: camdez.com/blog/2025/04...

(I'm trying to train myself share the little things and not get fussy about having something "big" to share.)

24.04.2025 03:13 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Screenshot of camdez/flow-experiments on GitHub showing some random Clojure code using the new clojure.core.async.flow library.

Screenshot of camdez/flow-experiments on GitHub showing some random Clojure code using the new clojure.core.async.flow library.

#wipwednesday I’ve been working on a series of semi-meaty clojure.core.async.flow examples and a guide to cover all of the features and hopefully some sensible dev patterns. Just starting to get them pushed. github.com/camdez/flow-...

Anything you’ve been wondering about flow? #clojure

24.04.2025 01:12 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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"We cannot give everyone a trial," says the president of these United States.

21.04.2025 21:54 👍 15439 🔁 4241 💬 2636 📌 1549
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The Duality of Transducers I finally got around to re-recording and posting this talk on Clojure’s transducers that I gave last year to the Austin Clojure Meetup:

Blog post with a touch of background on this talk: camdez.com/blog/2025/04...

22.04.2025 04:26 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Headline that says mushrooms may talk to one another with up to 50 words

Headline that says mushrooms may talk to one another with up to 50 words

so they're mycoblogging

21.04.2025 00:15 👍 25172 🔁 4837 💬 429 📌 402
The Duality of Transducers — Clojure's Transducers from Scratch
The Duality of Transducers — Clojure's Transducers from Scratch YouTube video by Cameron Desautels

I finally re-recorded and published my intro to Clojure's transducers talk that I gave last year. Check it out if you're a Clojure user who's not yet using transducers. It includes the insight that made me start using transducers every day: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACwJ... #clojure

21.04.2025 01:55 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

I really need to have kids because someone needs to inherit my open tabs when I die.

19.04.2025 17:38 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Pure villainy. Time for us all to get our Navalny on

08.04.2025 23:13 👍 999 🔁 230 💬 92 📌 18
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“I promise you, (John Lewis) that I will do everything possible to make you proud.” —Cory Booker

01.04.2025 23:23 👍 5083 🔁 935 💬 56 📌 70

Ugh, TikTok’s small business propaganda campaign is so good.

01.04.2025 02:03 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Thank you @petebuttigieg.bsky.social

25.03.2025 01:21 👍 7610 🔁 2557 💬 208 📌 272
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THE MOTHER OF ALL PAIN TRADES

In the newsletter, wrote about the simple chart that interests me more than anything else right now.

Sub here to the newsletter: www.bloomberg.com/account/news...

21.03.2025 16:38 👍 183 🔁 24 💬 13 📌 2
programmers are always posting like "worked on tracking down an issue with a Flurble deployment for twelve hours. the problem wasn't in Flurble at all - it was in the Gumbies install. It turns out if you install Gumbies 3.0 over Gumbies 2.7 and don't do a cache flush on all the client spiders they'll get stuck in the crystal maze." then you look up Gumbies and the site is one of those scroll scroll scroll types
with one sentence per page, like "GUMBIES is a lean, expressive sharding sandcube for testing and deploying large scale
Woodchips playgrounds. GUMBIES automates and streamlines away watersliding phases, meaning your team can
get right to the chipping. See why Microsoft, OpenAl and Bloingo have embraced GUMBIES in their Woodchips
workflows." and you get to the bottom and you're like I
want this I guess but I still don't know what

programmers are always posting like "worked on tracking down an issue with a Flurble deployment for twelve hours. the problem wasn't in Flurble at all - it was in the Gumbies install. It turns out if you install Gumbies 3.0 over Gumbies 2.7 and don't do a cache flush on all the client spiders they'll get stuck in the crystal maze." then you look up Gumbies and the site is one of those scroll scroll scroll types with one sentence per page, like "GUMBIES is a lean, expressive sharding sandcube for testing and deploying large scale Woodchips playgrounds. GUMBIES automates and streamlines away watersliding phases, meaning your team can get right to the chipping. See why Microsoft, OpenAl and Bloingo have embraced GUMBIES in their Woodchips workflows." and you get to the bottom and you're like I want this I guess but I still don't know what

This is my entire life

17.03.2025 01:53 👍 1503 🔁 417 💬 28 📌 39

• LLMs are powerful and useful.
• They’re a million miles from AGI.

If you can accept those facts and live in the middle ground, you’ll go far.

14.03.2025 02:35 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The best cooking advice I ever got is: "it's done when it smells like food".

Maybe that's obvious to some but it really changed things for me.

These days I throw things in the oven and go work or read; the moment I notice the smell, it's either cooked or on the verge. No timer, no burning.

05.03.2025 00:25 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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GitHub - goshatch/orgroam_to_obsidian: Convert an org-roam notes collection to markdown for Obsidian Convert an org-roam notes collection to markdown for Obsidian - goshatch/orgroam_to_obsidian

@gosha.net Thank you for this! github.com/goshatch/org...

I’ve been too lazy to hack something up myself, but this got me over the hump.

27.01.2025 01:20 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Seems like the right instinct. There’s a wisp of a chance to create a better place. I suppose we ought to try.

20.12.2024 04:20 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I’ve realized in recent years that I have no interest in fan / celebrity relationships. I don’t want to worship at anyone’s altar. If that’s what’s on offer, I’ll typically just move on.

18.12.2024 02:05 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I believe it was The Vergecast (@theverge.com) that recently succinctly explained something I hadn’t quite put my finger on:

All of the mainstream social media companies (incl. X) have become creator platforms, which are not social media in the original sense of peer-to-peer interaction.

18.12.2024 02:04 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

I really have no complaints. Happy to retire my old PS4, and not wonder if I should be buying a PS5 I’ll play a dozen times before it too is old. No way I’m building a gaming PC at this point in my life. It’s the perfect solution for me.

16.11.2024 17:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0