transducers_9p_etc.txt

i feel like all of those things are intended to be used in larger programs

so like, you could fit them into a smaller algorithm problem, but they
yeah?

so like, read the bit on transducers, and then implement one that
does a caeser cipher

and then getting more ambitious you could do stuff like more
complex encryption, or compression, or whatever

some compression algorithms can work on streams!

gzip can work on streaming data

i actually implemented such a thing at my last job :)

we have to stream really big files (like 100s of GB, way too big to fit in memory) and compress them on the fly through our webapp

it was pretty fun :)

bioinformatic data

basically genome sequences

we stored them uncompressed, but wanted to be able to serve them
to users compressed on uncompressed depending what they wanted

so, maybe lets read the part on transducers from the clojure docs and see what we can do?

it depends, but i'd say so


usually if there's documentation on something i will read it, not completedly, but just enough
to get off the ground implementing something

and then just go start working on it and refer back to the doumentation if i get stuck

the thing i'm trying to learn right now there's little documentation so i'm doing a lot of reading the source code
of things to figure out how they work instead

9p, its a network filesystem protocol from plan9, the operating system that the bell labs people designed to be like
the "next unix". it never really took off, but it had a lot of cool ideas, one of which was this protocol

a lot of the people who worked on plan9 now work on Go (the language) and so there's a lot of libraries etc
in the Go worled for doing plan9 styff

ive been curious about it for a while so i'm trying to learn about the protocol and write a small server that uses it

nothign really, it's just a hell of a lot simpler than modern alternatives

like the other thing i could use would be FUSE, but FUSE isn't really a network protocol so much as it is a kernel extensoin API? like a FUSE filesystem is represented as a shared library with a bunch of C functions that the kernel loads in and calls

which is fine, but FUSE is also really complicated, theres like 30 different functions at least in the interface?

9p is cool because it's explicitly a network protocol, clients and servers can be written in whatever langauge you wanted

it makes the idea of mounting filesystems that exist on the network rather than your own machine a first class thing

which is pretty cool, and was sort of one of the main ideas of plan9

they thought of it as like a "distributed operating system", part
of the theme was accessing remote resources in the same wa you
access local resources (by mounting them into your filesystem
tree, which you could do, since everything just exposed itself as
a 9p server)

im using go just because theres tools around it, but ive read the source code for python and c implenetations to learn about whats going on more


its been pretty fun :)

but anyway, transucse4r?

my impression is that they might be a slightly higher level of abstraction that we need to write a caeser cipher

but lets keep reading and see

hmmm interesting, i feel like a caeser cipher transducer would just be

(map (caeser 3))

where caeser is a function that takes a number and returns a function that
rotates a character that number of places in the alphabet

maybe?

lets try it :)

i mean lets see if it works first

i dont really have much of a working clojure setup, so lets use your machien