Clojure

[Marc Peabody]

I just started learning Clojure with a few friends using the ProgPrag book:
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure

Anyone else around here taking the time to learn Clojure?

[Gabriel Claramunt]

Is in my TODO list. I'm really interested in the concurrency constructs it provides (STM specially). Maybe that's enough to get over my aversion to Lisp code...

[Amanda Leigh]

Ive spent quite a bit of time with it, and I really like it. Rich hickey gives some excellent talks, which is what got me interested initially. Chunked sequences are quite nice.

Is the question simply to see who is learning the language or did you have other specific reasons for the post?

I am not using it professionally yet but I have a friend who is using it for unit testing (which as far as I can tell, as with any unit testing, is simply exploiting syntax and not really any of the language benefits).

[Marc Peabody]

I'm mainly putting my feelers out to see if others are actively studying it. Hopefully when I run into problems I can post them here.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Yes, Clojure is on my list.
I'm really excited about it since I never learnt about LISP.
Currently I'm confused about what is my second language on the JVM: Groovy, Scala or Clojure.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

My latest update:
I added Clojure to my arsenal and I really enjoy it, I wish if I can do some serious projects with it.

[Christophe Verré]

I've started learning it too. But still I'm struggling to find any good reason to use it.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Christophe Verré wrote:I've started learning it too. But still I'm struggling to find any good reason to use it.

I have a lot of reasons to use it but I can't employ it in my current job (as iOS developer).

[Christophe Verré]

Can you tell me some of these reasons ?

[Hussein Baghdadi]

I'm by no mean an expert, just a Clojure enthusiast.

Low ceremony, highly expressive which means Clojure programs are short and easy to maintain (of course after you get a Clojure eye).

It is Lisp which means code is data, the crown jewel of Lisp legendry power.

Clojure is fast and version 1.3 is promising to deliver a magnificant performance boost.

Concurreny in Clojure is awesome, IMHO Clojure support for concurrency (not to forget Akka framework) is the current best solution.

Excellent Java interoperability (although I think Scala offers the best Java interoperability).

Of course the list is much bigger but these are quick points.

[Christophe Verré]

Thank you John. But these are Clojure appeal points. I've read them too in the doc. I was looking for something more like :

A: "If I were to made a program which does X and Y, I'd go for Clojure."
B: "Why ? You can do it in Java too."
A: "Yes, but Clojure allows you to do it this way and that way. It's easier."

I'm looking for something more practical. If I want to sort a file, I'll probably use a unix command. If I want to sort files, compare them and do special stuff, I might use Perl. Why would I use Clojure ? I'm really interested in trying to use, but I can't find any concrete application to it.

PS : I haven't gone deep enough yet, so I might just be missing the whole point

[Hussein Baghdadi]

I'm using Clojure primarily as a scripting language.
For example, I'm writing now Clojure script to import my saved bookmarked links in Delicious and save them to Zootool.
I didn't do any serious Clojure development but I'm absolutely sure it will brings a lot of added values to my software.

[Christophe Verré]

John Todd wrote:I'm using Clojure primarily as a scripting language.
For example, I'm writing now Clojure script to import my saved bookmarked links in Delicious and save them to Zootool.
I didn't do any serious Clojure development but I'm absolutely sure it will brings a lot of added values to my software.

Now that's concrete Thanks John. I guess you are using some libraries to achieve that ?

[Hussein Baghdadi]

I'm trying not to fall back to any Java library or API, I'm trying to implement it in idiomatic and pure Clojure.
Delicious allows you to fetch your bookmarks via HTML feeds.
I'm trying to lean heavily on Clojure sequences.

[Christophe Verré]

It sounds interesting ! And it may be a fun practical exercise.

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Christophe Verré wrote:It sounds interesting ! And it may be a fun practical exercise.

Although it is really trivial but I will release the source code once I finish it (not soon to be sure ).