Programming projects

Some quick notes, brainstorming on learning new programming languages, programming projects etc

Currently I know Ruby, which I've used for the last few years.

• very difficult to make Mac GUI apps
  • the GUI part
  • the installation/distribution part
  • (might be partially solved by RubyMotion, but non-OSS, and 90% of focus on iOS. Few example apps etc. Don't know how compatible all existing libraries are. Some good work on wrapping libraries to abstract Objective C libraries)
• very little support for data science, machine learning, statistics
• community very focused on web development, not academic computing etc.

• very interesting paradigm, and history
• lot's of very intelligent people involved
• many companies contributing libraries
• leverage Java libraries
• ClojureScript for the web
• but slow JVM startup, stack traces
• easier to distribute? easier to make GUIs? but still not native. few example apps.
• lack of good citeproc/bibtex libraries in Clojure/Java

• Rewriting as an app in Clojure? Tons of work, missing libraries…
• Could remove dependency on Keyboard Maestro (capture keyboard shortcuts) and make it easier to distribute
• Possibly integrate wiki (but hard to replicate all of Dokuwiki functionality)
• Still dependent on BibDesk and Skim
• Possibility of rewriting parts of it as web-only, using Clojure/ClojureScript? Is there a minimal set of functionality that would be useful?

• Server/client with API
• Define some kind of data format (events, time periods, etc)
• Visualization - in GUI with JFreeCharts, or in browser with D3/C2 etc?
• Leverage any of the work on LightTable, getting ClojureScript to work in GUI?

• R for now
• Julia
• Clojure with Incanter - might not be worth it for now