Glenn Vanderburg - Cló: The Algorithms of TeX in Clojure

Glenn Vanderburg presents Cló, a Clojure library that translates TeX's core typesetting algorithms from procedural literate programming into functional form.

Cló is a typesetting library for Clojure, implementing the core typesetting algorithms of TeX as composable functions. Although much work remains before Cló is useful in practice, even at an early stage it is instructive, providing interestingly complex examples of real-world procedural algorithms translated into functional form. Thinking about typesetting as a functional problem has yielded valuable clarity and insight about these algorithms, even though in their original form they were written with instruction and teaching in mind (the notion of "literate programming" was invented for TeX). In this talk, I'll share some of the background, code, results, and lessons learned so far. Glenn is Director of Architecture and Internal Applications at LivingSocial. He has been a professional programmer for 30 years, is a longtime Rubyist, and has been using Clojure since 2009. He knows just enough about typography to notice when it's bad, and is the kind of annoying person who notices when a period is in the wrong font.