lp/clj

Learning (aka. playing with) Clojure

• first heard about it early 2012 (I think)
• dipped my feet in a few times since then
• came across (i.e. read or saw things they did) a few interesting people using/writing Clojure in interesting way (fogus, Rich Hickey, Chris Granger)
• now reading 'The Joy of Clojure' (and enjoying it)

Tools

• mostly LightTable
• previously Vim with the VimClojure plugin, but not right now (LightTable 'feels' more interactive to me and what I miss most from Vim (keybindings) will be in LT soonish, I also think that something like LT has more potential to be extensible and has a much saner extension language)
• the clj repl

Giggles & quibbles

• the giggles
  • homoiconic
  • has macros
  • good feature inheritance (supposedly, not as in OO)
  • lots of cool projects (datomic, matchure, ring, lighttable, typed-clojure)
• the quibbles
  • the dynamic type-system continues to bite me could be my fault, but I often jump right in without reading the whole documentation and have spend too much time tracking weird errors down that were all fixed by changing one place in the code
  • learning new libraries without sufficient docs/tutorials (e.g. what are the arguments to this function, what does this map mean; maybe clojure wants me to think differently)
  • the jvm overhead is bad for my little computer (too slow, too much memory consumed)

Hickups

Some examples for the quibbles.

• (if (= something something-undefined) true-expr false-expr) not throwing an exeption for something-undefined being not defined