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0 pointssiscia12y ago0 comments

I am definitely not the best developer you will ever find, however I learn clojure by myself and it wasn't so hard...

(This is exactly the behaviour you are point as wrong, and I know it.)

The resource I had (back in the 2011/2012) were just a book, `The joy of Clojure`, my background was some C and mostly python, nothing about FP.

I don't see any of ClojureScript, Edn (???) nor core.whatever so fundamental... Those are just other tools, you can write any webserver using the old JS, JSON and any other lib you may need... (Anyway you should not try to learn clojure building web server, are the less clojure-y piece of software you can build IMHO)

IMHO, the biggest problem is the paradigm shift that most developer need to have in order of learn clojure.

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hga12y ago· 2 in thread

Indeed. Learning functional programming in any language is a major jump for those of us (pretty much all of us?) who started out with imperative languages. It's ultimately very rewarding, but plenty of work in addition to mind stretching.

Then again you probably should have listened to all those people telling you to do The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP/6.001) ^_^, I merely lucked out to be at the edge of the community that created it, so it sort of fell into my lap, with strong recommendations that "this is revealed truth" as I like to put it.

sisciaOP12y ago

I catch up on the SICP :)

hga12y ago

To give but one example, if you're having any trouble with loop/recur, do the exercises on recursive functions that implement iteration without stack growth through tail recursion (the latter a feature that's unfortunately not available in the JVM; the flip side is that recur isn't going to blow your stack).

In the last couple of weeks I had to write a bunch of those in Clojure for the first time "in anger" (for real), and that part of it was trivial because of the SCIP I'd done in the early '80s. Learning that and pounding in my head for the first time was a bit hard, but well worth it, back then and of course now.

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