Today I started using a lovely Clojure library called Overtone, for generating music. It is pretty easy to use and a fun time. On the box it says that you need to be “comfortable with” Clojure, the basics of music theory, and the Supercollider audio synthesis environment. I do not know any of these things and I successfully made sounds by copying and changing examples.

I wrote a tiny bit of code to play rhythms. And I ran into my first clojure bug! I defined a function side-effecty-thing, and ran

(map side-effecty thing sequence)

And that ran fine. It made sounds!

But then I tried something like

(def new-function [time]
    (map side-effecty thing sequence)
    (apply-at (+ time 4) '#new-function (+ time 4)))

which basically does the (map side-effecty-thing) and then calls itself recursively, later. And this did not make sounds. And I was TOTALLY CONFUSED, because, it says (map side-effecty-thing) in it! It should make sounds!

But then Travis explained that map is lazy and not actually appropriate if you want the function you are running to happen right away.

So what I actually wanted to use was doseq, which will let you actually make the side-effecty things happen when you ask for them. And it throws away the result, which is good because I didn’t actually want the result. Yay!

ALSO EMACS IS ENJOYABLE. Paredit is nice. I am in fact not using Evil mode. I am using Normal Emacs, with a few packages:

• Graphene, to make everything a bit prettier
• clojure mode, clojure test mode, and cider, for Clojure fun. Apparently cider is the thing that people use now and it is the same as nRepl.

This is a strange and confusing world, humans! I no longer know how to write if statements without looking it up! Very Exciting Times!