After giving ParenScript another chance I became hopeful of the possibilities for front-end development in Common Lisp. It is not the language it is the tooling, but Lisp is a language that lets you develop your tooling faster. Could I close the gap to the ClojureScript+Reagent+Re-frame ecosystem? Well, optimization is my favorite procrastination, so I might as well give it a try.
Web development is the skill that irritates me the most. It has improved over the years. The tools available today are far superior. But, I only glimpse at better web design skills. I often times struggle to understand why some websites look the way they do. Even with full access to their source code, replicating them isn’t always evident. There are HTML & CSS tricks I refuse to practice in the aim of simplifying what I imitate. That means some layouts don’t look exactly the same.
During my PhD I always wanted to have an interactive way of plotting a nice looking Bethe Lattice and particular to my work a Dimer Bethe lattice. Because this visualization wasn’t an essential part of my research I never investigated into it. It is enough to draw them on paper for any practical purpose. I was then confronted with my PhD oral presentation, great opportunity to procrastinate and get the nice unessential plots done. They didn’t end in the final version of the presentation(again is not the fundamental part of my work), but I wanted to share them anyway.
I’m guilty of having this online blog and not writing on it. I confess that working on its looks and internals is way more fun for me than actually writing some words in plain English for everyone to read. That however misses the point, because it is the blog post that justify the blog, not its internals.
This comes after an old idea, that has been bugging me in the last years: “I can’t do everything myself anymore, there is just no time for such thing”. I’m not a specialist in everything, I chose to focus long ago in physics. Thus, for all those web development things I can’t do them on my own anymore. I have to use framework and templates.