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Introduction to Clojure

At the first joint meeting of erloungeRDU and TriFunc, Aaron Bedra (and possibly Stuart Halloway) from Relevance LLC will be introducing Clojure, a Lisp variant that runs on the JVM.

From the Clojure site:

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

erlounge RDU meetings are split into two sections. The first, lasting 30-45 minutes will be a directed learning session focusing on some aspect of Erlang. Past topics have included introductory reviews of Erlang's syntax, getting Emacs configured for Erlang, and informal code reviews.

The second half of the meeting, lasting for at least 30 minutes, will be an informal session where people can continue working on programming exercises, socialize, or give a 5-10 minute lightning talk about something cool they're doing with Erlang. We've got a small but growing Erlang community who's doing some pretty cool stuff.

Wow. Another month has gone by and it's time for another erlounge. Things have gotten a bit stale of late and I've no-one to blame but myself. It's time I fixed that.

So.

This month, and subsequent months, we're going to start splitting the meetings into two parts. The first, lasting 30-45 minutes will be a directed learning session focusing on some aspect of Erlang. This month we'll focus on the basics of Erlang, getting it installed and getting acquainted with the syntax. In subsequent months we'll move onto writing concurrent programs and finally exploring the power of distributed Erlang.

The second half of the meeting, lasting for at least 30 minutes, will be an informal session where people can continue working on programming exercises, socialize, or give a 5-10 minute lightning talk about something cool they're doing with Erlang. We've got a small but growing Erlang community who's doing some pretty cool stuff like Mark Imbriaco who put Erlang to work at 37 Signals and Sean Cribbs who's written a Twitter bot in Erlang.

Do you remember playing the game telephone as a kid? We're going to implement the same thing in Erlang -- hopefully without the message corruption the game is famous for! It should be a fun evening and give everyone a chance to hone their Erlang skills.

The meeting will happen at the usual time and place. Sean Cribbs will be picking up the mantle of group leader since I'll be out of town.

Do you remember playing the game telephone as a kid? We're going to implement the same thing in Erlang -- hopefully without the message corruption the game is famous for! It should be a fun evening and give everyone a chance to hone their Erlang skills.

The meeting will happen at the usual time and place. Sean Cribbs will be picking up the mantle of group leader since I'll be out of town.