Functional Brighton

Getting Clojure

May 20, 2014 · 7:30 PM
The Skiff

Dan has kindly stepped forward to show us Clojure.

Lisp is always cropping up on those lists of languages that should be learned because they "fundamentally change the way you think about programming". However, it is easy to be put off by the sea of parentheses and weird Polish notation syntax.

With Clojure, a modern Lisp that is hosted on the JVM or compiled to JavaScript, suddenly the power of Lisp can reach right into mainstream environments. In my opinion there has never been a better time to learn Lisp (or a better Lisp to learn).

In this session, I'll be demoing the things I think makes Clojure unique - from persistent data structures, to its approach to concurrency, macros, as well as a look at some of the more interesting Clojure libraries out there.

If you'd like to hack along, just install a copy of the Light Table editor and download the latest version of Leiningen (the Clojure build tool).

We start at 7:30pm (someone will be at the Skiff to let you in from 7:15).

See you there!

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Seraphina A.

Thanks for an excellent talk - going to go off and explore Clojure in my tea breaks! Sorry I had to dash and could not make it to the pub- had an early start the next day! Love the idea of self-generating code, and would have liked to find out more about how that works...

0 · May 22, 2014
- A former member
  
  I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I think the idea of self-generating code is really quite intoxicating - the essay I mentioned at the beginning that got me interested in Lisp (http://www.paulgraham...) has a very interesting take on macros and the power that they can bestow... I'm hoping we can revisit Clojure at Functional Brighton in the future - there's so much interesting stuff there, from logic programming(core.logic) to music synthesis(overtone) and algorithmic drawing (quil)...
  
  0 · May 23, 2014
Luke M.

Good talk Dan :)

1 · May 21, 2014
Justin N.

I enjoyed the talk, and intend on going to more of the Functional Brighton events. What would be nice for future though, would be to have a 10 minute session at the beginning, helping people to configure their laptops to compile and run the code demonstrated in the session. I have a Windows laptop, never used Light Table before, nor have I heard of Leiningen.

Sorry I couldn't stay for the pub afterwards, but I had some other things I needed to do after the talk, maybe next time!

1 · May 21, 2014
- A former member
  
  Good point! Sorry about that.
  
  0 · May 21, 2014
- Justin N.
  
  Nothing to be sorry about, just some constructive feedback for future talks! I enjoyed watching and wouldn't have been able to keep up with everything going on with my own setup last night, but I would like to try with future talks. Or at least go home and know that I can play around. :)
  
  1 · May 21, 2014
Robin T.

Great talk :)

0 · May 21, 2014