Chance findings

The first real programming task on CodeKata is Kata 2, Karate Chop. Or as the introduction says:

A binary chop (sometimes called the more prosaic binary search) finds the position of value in a sorted array of values.

I started out with the simplest approach I could think of: there just might be a function already readily available in Clojure which solves the problem. After all, Common Lisp has position whereas Pythonistas would use the index method on lists. I couldn’t really find a function on clojure sequences which would immediately take care of the issue, but keep-indexed seems close enough — taking a function and a collection, it calls the function which ought to take an index and a value, and keeps the function’s returned non-nil values. This led to the following code:

(defn chop [x coll]
    (let [result
            (keep-indexed
               (fn [idx item]
                 (when (= item x) idx))
               coll)]
        (if (empty? result)
            -1
          (first result))))

Some points may be of interest here:

• Looking over some code, I ran into the usage of %1 etc. to refer to implicit arguments, which I didn’t knew about when I started out. This version screams ‘Common Lisp’ pretty much all over.
• I also ran into the empty sequence <> false issue, of course and had to look up ‘empty?’ as well.
• Using when instead of if when you only care about the true state is an idiom I knew and love from CL. The if part at the end is still ugly. We could get rid of it by relying on first on an empty sequence to return nil and using this in a boolean comparison.

This leads to the following much shorter version:

(defn chop [x coll]
    (let [result (keep-indexed #(when (= %2 x) %1) coll)]
        (or (first result) -1)))

The next idea is to use a multi-method approach, dispatching on either values, possibly empty ones and on type, of course. This is an approach which I think should be possible with CLOS, but is quite outside of mainstream object-oriented languages like Java or Python. We could combine this with a recursive approach. One base case of the recursion would be the empty collection, of course, with the other one being finding the searched value, returning the current index in the sequence which we have to carry around (straight forward recursion). ClojureDocs example 683 has a nice blue print (http://clojuredocs.org/clojure_core/clojure.core/defmulti#example_683). The result has a nice declarative touch to it, which reminds me of my old Prolog days:

While not being a kata, setup of the environment in which it’s possible to do the programming for them is a task that needs to be fulfilled anyway. I hence see that as some sort of a separate kata, to familiarize oneself with various development environments.

These are the requirements for setting up a Clojure development environment on Windows, using a portable apps approach. In more detail these are the exact requirements:

• All portable applications are available on drive J: This is a USB stick in my case.
• We’ll need git, emacs and clojure of course.
• We’ll also need leiningen at some later stage.
• Configuration of the application will be stored on the external drive (e.g. J:) as well where possible.
• We’ll use nrepl instead of slime/swank. I never got the latter set up to work correctly as portable apps.

This describes the setup I’m currently using. First of all, the downloads. For the stuff that has repositories on github, I would suggest using git clone <repositoryURI> (after you’ve installed git in the first place, of course).

• Emacs (24.2 at the time of writing) can be downloaded from the FSF Emacs server
• git (1.7.6 at the time of writing) can be downloaded from msys
• leiningen requires wget, which can be installed e.g. from here. Another option would be to install MinGW with git and wget, cf. MinGW
• clojure (1.5.0 at the time of writing) can be downloaded from Clojure.org, of course.
• leiningen version 2 can be downloaded from leininigen github repo
• clojure-mode version 2 can be installed via Marmalade/ELPA or manually from it’s github repository
• nrepl.el can be also be installed via Marmalade/ELPA or manually from it’s github repository
• I’ll throw in magit for smooth Emacs interaction with git, to be fetched via Marmalade/ELPA or manually from magit’s repository

I’ll use the following directory layout: All applications are stored under J:\\progs\, e.g. Emacs 24.2 will end up as J:\\progs\emacs-24.2\. I put the clojure.jar into J:\\progs\\clojure\ and will put lein.bat along with it into the clojure directory. The following shows the resulting directory as shown by dired:

  J:
  insgesamt 5124
  drwx------  3 schauer schauer   16384 Nov  1  2011 emacs
  drwx------ 12 schauer schauer   16384 Okt 16  2012 progs

  J:\\progs:
  drwx------  8 schauer schauer     16384 Nov  1  2011 clojure
  drwx------  8 schauer schauer     16384 Okt  7  2012 emacs-24.2
  drwx------ 11 schauer schauer     16384 Nov  1  2011 git
  drwx------  8 schauer schauer     16384 Nov  1  2011 wget

My Emacs configuration resides in a separate directory on J:, namely in J:\\emacs\. As I already have quite a lot of emacs configuration, I’m going to put all configuration options into separate files, which are placed in J:\\emacs\elisp\config\. Code from other people will go in separate directories as well, with J:\\emacs\elisp\others\ as the top-level folder. clojure-mode hence goes to J:\\emacs\elisp\others\clojure-mode. nrepl.el is a mode but a single file and goes straight into J:\\emacs\elisp\others\. Emacs looks for default.el or site-start.el during startup to look for personal or site-wide configuration. Both files can be placed in the site-lisp directory, i.e. in J:\\progs\emacs-24.2\site-lisp\

  J:\\emacs:
  drwx------  6 schauer schauer   16384 Nov  1  2011 elisp

  J:\\emacs\elisp:
  drwx------ 3 schauer schauer 16384 Nov  1  2011 config
  drwx------ 4 schauer schauer 16384 Nov  1  2011 development
  drwx------ 6 schauer schauer 16384 Nov  1  2011 others

Next we need to adopt the load-path, i.e. where Emacs looks for libraries. This means we need to put some content in J:\\progs\emacs-24.2\site-lisp\default.el that takes care of figuring out the drive letter and sets paths correctly:

(defun get-drive-from-filename (filename)
  "Returns a windows drive letter if filename contains a drive letter."
  (if (string-match "^\\(.:\\)/" filename)
      (match-string 1 filename)))

(defun get-drive-for-emacspath ()
  "Returns windows drive letter for the drive emacs can be found on."
  (get-drive-from-filename (getenv "EMACSPATH")))

(let ((emacsdrive (get-drive-for-emacspath))
       loadpath-additions)
  (dolist (dirname
       '("/emacs/elisp/"
         "/emacs/elisp/config/" 
         "/emacs/elisp/others/"
         "/emacs/elisp/others/clojure-mode/"))
    (setq loadpath-additions
      (cons (concat emacsdrive dirname) loadpath-additions)))
  (setq load-path
    (append loadpath-additions load-path)))

(require 'nrepl)        
(require 'clojure-mode)
(setq clojure-mode-inf-lisp-command 
      (concat (get-drive-for-emacspath)
           "/progs/clojure/lein.bat repl"))


(require 'magit)
(setq magit-git-executable
      (concat (get-drive-for-emacspath)
           "/progs/git/bin/git"))

The next step is to install leiningen. There are two ways: either downloading lein.bat and running it from cmd or downloading lein, the shell script and running it via the git bash prompt. I chose the latter. You will probably need to adjust your path to where you put the lein shell script, e.g. (bash syntax):

export PATH=$PATH:/j/progs/clojure/

To install leiningen locally (i.e. not in your %HOME%), you have to set the LEIN_HOME environment variable, i.e. like this (bash syntax):

export LEIN_HOME=/j/progs/clojure

Remember to always set this variable afterwards before running leiningen commands. Point your classpath to where you installed clojure:

export CLASSPATH=/j/progs/clojure/clojure-1.5.0/clojure-1.5.0

If you don’t want to set all these variables all the time, you can put them either in a .profile file in your %HOME% or in the global profile file that comes with git which resides in /j/progs/git/etc/. I added the following lines:

CLOJUREPATH=/j/progs/clojure 
if test -x $CLOJUREPATH
then 
     export PATH=$PATH:$CLOJUREPATH
     export LEIN_HOME=$CLOJUREPATH
     export CLASSPATH=$CLOJUREPATH/clojure-1.5.0/clojure-1.5.0
else
     echo "Can not access /j/progs/clojure"
     exit 1
fi

To figure out how to get rid of the hardcoded drive letter in bash is left as an exercise to the reader.

If you also want to keep the files / jars which leiningen retrieves in a local, non-standard maven repository, you need to set a variable in your $LEIN_HOME/profiles.clj file, like this:

{:user {:local-repo "j://progs/clojure/.m2/"
        :repositories  {"local" {:url "file://j/progs/clojure/.m2"
                                  :releases {:checksum :ignore}}}
        :plugins [[lein-localrepo "0.5.2"]]}}

Then run lein self-install. Afterwards, a lein repl should give you a Clojure read-eval-print-loop.

Now if you want to use nrepl and would like to use the support for nrepl/inferior-lisp which comes with clojure-mode you need to add a corresponding dependency to your project.clj for each project, cf. nrepl installation