Tawny-OWL 1.2
About six months after the release of Tawny-OWL 1.1.0 (n.d.a) I am pleased to announce the 1.2 release. There have been a number of changes in this release, some planned, some not.
About six months after the release of Tawny-OWL 1.1.0 (n.d.a) I am pleased to announce the 1.2 release. There have been a number of changes in this release, some planned, some not.
In this post, I describe the different technologies that I’ve tried for writing a new book, from markdown to LaTeX.
Godwin’s law says that sooner or later every argument on the internet ends up with someone being called a Nazi. Interestingly in the Open Access debate, this has turned out not to be true; in this case, it’s been communists instead.
I first discovered the Visitors pattern from reading the original design patterns book, sometime in the last century when, having jumped into computer science, I was busy hoovering up everything I could about programming. After reading the chapter on visitors, it made no sense to me then and I had no real cause to go near them again until I started working on Tawny-OWL (n.d.a) This library includes a renderer which takes a set of OWL API OWLObjects and turns them into Clojure data structures. Originally, I added this simply to generate documentation, but since then it’s grown to have rather a life of its own. In Java, this would be be implemented with a visitor. In Clojure, I implemented this with multimethods which is often used as a replacement for the visitor pattern but I am now far from convinced that this was a good decision, after the performance of my code collapsed massively. In this article, I describe the problems with multimethods, and some alternatives. For each of these, I use a small example, and bench mark them; you can follow my code on https://github.com/phillord/visitor-benchmark. The results are, perhaps, a little surprising. This should be of relevance to anyone addressing the same problem in Clojure.