Getting Clojure

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation) syntax.

With Clojure (http://clojure.org/), 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 (http://www.lighttable.com/) editor and download the latest version of Leiningen (http://leiningen.org/) (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!