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<contributor-bias> I seriously think Clojure is too much to take in at the first introduction. It's really hard to get your brain around everything done right

<contributor-bias> I seriously think Clojure is too much to take in at the first introduction. It's really hard to get your brain around everything done right, when compared to traditional programming. You need to use it for a while to really get why it's approach to state (not concurrency) is awesome. </contributor-bias>

KirinDave 16y ago
I think that this may be a side-effect of the literature, which is very lispy and computer sciency. For someone like me, that's exactly the right tack. For someone who may not take for granted all the claims Rich and his book-writing compatriots are making (let alone take for granted the lisp code-as-data is an foundational revelation of computer science), it may be a problem. Because really, Clojure is in many ways simpler than both Scala and Java. You can ignore the hard parts (agents, deftype, macros, de-chunking seqs, etc) and just cruise through the easy parts with a fair degree of ease. Everyone understands functions, after all. And Javascript has really pushed the "use functions for everything" approach into the public eye quite nicely.
- francoisdevlin 16y ago
  That, and we're still getting our act together in the Clojure world. Stay tuned :)
jacquesm 16y ago
I keep asking for, and I will do so again here, a non-toy web application written in clojure as a study object for newbies to dissect. That would help a lot.
- swannodette 16y ago
  What would qualify as non-toy? With Ring and a routing library like Moustache what more do you really need for building a non-trivial web application in Clojure?
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Well, you outline the problem really nicely there. Never heard of Moustache, and the problem is in figuring out how all the bits go together and what is the 'best' way of doing this in clojure. The learning curve for the language alone is steep enough that having a non-trivial example would do wonders in terms of understanding how a clojure based website works under the hood.
    - swannodette 16y ago
      If you've ever worked with light weight http framework in Python or Ruby, it works exactly the same way. http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-web-development-ring.html http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-web-development-r... http://github.com/cgrand/moustache http://github.com/cgrand/moustache There isn't a mature web framework for Clojure yet (for obvious reasons), so there isn't a popular "way". At the moment you have a lot of good libraries and you can put your app together in whatever way seems most sound to you.

KirinDave 16y ago

I think that this may be a side-effect of the literature, which is very lispy and computer sciency. For someone like me, that's exactly the right tack. For someone who may not take for granted all the claims Rich and his book-writing compatriots are making (let alone take for granted the lisp code-as-data is an foundational revelation of computer science), it may be a problem. Because really, Clojure is in many ways simpler than both Scala and Java. You can ignore the hard parts (agents, deftype, macros, de-chunking seqs, etc) and just cruise through the easy parts with a fair degree of ease. Everyone understands functions, after all. And Javascript has really pushed the "use functions for everything" approach into the public eye quite nicely.

francoisdevlin 16y ago
That, and we're still getting our act together in the Clojure world. Stay tuned :)

jacquesm 16y ago

I keep asking for, and I will do so again here, a non-toy web application written in clojure as a study object for newbies to dissect. That would help a lot.

swannodette 16y ago
What would qualify as non-toy? With Ring and a routing library like Moustache what more do you really need for building a non-trivial web application in Clojure?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Well, you outline the problem really nicely there. Never heard of Moustache, and the problem is in figuring out how all the bits go together and what is the 'best' way of doing this in clojure. The learning curve for the language alone is steep enough that having a non-trivial example would do wonders in terms of understanding how a clojure based website works under the hood.
  - swannodette 16y ago
    If you've ever worked with light weight http framework in Python or Ruby, it works exactly the same way. http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-web-development-ring.html http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-web-development-r... http://github.com/cgrand/moustache http://github.com/cgrand/moustache There isn't a mature web framework for Clojure yet (for obvious reasons), so there isn't a popular "way". At the moment you have a lot of good libraries and you can put your app together in whatever way seems most sound to you.