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+Title: Introducing Clopher
+Date: 2019-05-06
+Categories: Series
+Tags: Clopher - TUI Gopher client
+Slug: clopher01
+Lang: en
+Summary: Introducing Clopher, the terminal based Gopher client I'm making.
+
+> Read all the posts in [Clopher series here]({tag}clopher-tui-gopher-client).
+
+When you do a hack (or even a dirty hack) you do it for some reason. You do it
+because you can understand the complexity of the problem and you see it's a
+complex problem to solve that needs a good enough solution for your case.
+
+You are facing the complexity. You are seeing it. You are seeing the deepness
+of the abyss.
+
+This project started a little bit like an exercise to do that. Take a simple
+problem: make a Gopher client, and try to solve it in a decent way collecting
+information during the process.
+
+It's just a learning project, but it went wild.
+
+The initial idea was to force myself to use Clojure's network API, which is
+Java's one, because I never used it in the past and I wanted to learn about it
+and the possible problems it can have. In order to do that I decided to write a
+[Gopher][gopher] client, because that way I'd also had to read the
+[RFC][gopher-rfc] and some resources more.
+
+I sketched the Gopher protocol exchange without many problems, because it's
+quite simple and the RFC is really well explained. The wild part came with the
+rest of the project, which still is under heavy development and *it doesn't
+work yet* (this sentence may be edited in the future, I hope it will).
+
+I wanted to make a terminal based client, and I had a cool library for this,
+called `clojure-lanterna` which is just an interface to `lanterna`, a java
+library for TUI (Terminal User Interfaces). When I wanted to use
+`clojure-lanterna` I realized the project was kind of abandoned and it didn't
+cover the UI elements, only the basic screen interface, and I decided to make
+it by myself.
+
+Further than that, I thought that if I focused on only POSIX compatible
+operating systems I wouldn't need to use `lanterna` neither. So I decided to
+implement everything by myself.
+
+That took me to some thoughts I've been having these days: When software has
+few dependencies or no dependencies at all you have more control over the
+process of making it. People who code in popular programming languages have
+even more libraries than we need and it's really hard to stop the temptation to
+use them (this explains some recent events with NPM repositories, for
+instance). This is not only about security –possible security breaches in
+libraries we use– or control –the fact that we included some software we don't
+know– it's also about remembering that libraries can't be software you just
+import: they should be read, analysed and, often, thrown away in favor of an
+ad-hoc solution. Many times ad-hoc solutions reduce the codebase size and they
+solve the problem more accurately, as they are specifically design to solve
+*our* problem.
+
+Also, it's good to tell yourself you can code everything from scratch and try
+to prove it true.
+
+In summary, I wanted a project that covered these points:
+
+- Be a simple Gopher client.
+- Written in Clojure.
+- Terminal User Interface (TUI).
+- No dependencies if possible.
+
+And all of them had some sense, at least in my mind, on the early beginning of
+the project.
+
+### So, here we are
+
+As I said before, the goal is not to create a good software. It's not even to
+create something that works. The idea is to learn during the process and this
+post series is a way to put what I learned in an ordered way.
+
+If you follow this post series, you'll follow me on my research and hacks. We
+are going to dive on all those weird concepts that will appear. I'll try to be
+as technically correct as I can but I'm not an expert and this is not a class.
+I'm just sharing my experiences.
+
+I'm looking at the abyss and telling you what I see from this view, pointing
+the interesting things I spot.
+
+
+[gopher]:     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
+[gopher-rfc]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436