June 2013 - Clojure Users Group Meetup

Brandon Bloom will present Fipp, the Fast Idiomatic Pretty Printer. Here's what Brandon has to say about it:

In considering a complex problem, I realized it looked sorta like a pretty printer. I decided to implement a toy pretty printer to study it, but discovered that pretty printing is a much harder and more interesting problem than I expected. Fipp, my "Fast Idiomatic Pretty Printer", is more than a toy: It's a significant improvement on the fundamentals of Clojure's pretty printer. I built Fipp using the latest algorithm from the research community and married that with Clojure's sensibilities about data. Fipp's implementation is dense enough to discuss in its entirety in only a few minutes. However, the subtleties of its design requires much deeper consideration. In particular, we'll explore how to select representations, data structures, and algorithms for simple and efficient systems.