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0 pointselangoc12y ago0 comments

I attended the Clojure/West conference about 3 weeks ago, and the sentiments are valid. But also, the Clojure community is starting to focus on the beginner learning curve aspects. Right now, there's a ClojureBridge effort (based on RailsBridge) to increase the diversity in the community. And it's been generating interest among people even outside the under-represented demographics. I'll be co-teaching the ClojureBridge SF session in 3 weeks, ping me if you're interested in future Clojure workshops (given the huge amount of interest, there definitely will be more!).

I think there's going to be some efforts in the near future in the Clojure community to tackle the low-hanging fruit of improving beginners' path to mastery.

If you come from OOP school of programming and the Algol/C++/Java style of syntax (true of many popular languages these days), then Clojure does require a re-think of the programming paradigm. But it truly is worth it -- it will make you a better programmer -- and the community is friendly, smart, and always learning and improving. It's certainly a language that I think that I will grow as a programmer by being with.

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hga12y ago· 1 in thread

I think you might be overstating the syntax switching problems. The syntax of earlier Lisps is insanely simple, and Clojure only a little more so.

I base this in part on the very popular Python language's use of white space, which to a seasoned Lisper looks very familiar.

As for the focus on "diversity", I submit it might be misplaced at the moment, especially to the extent AlwaysBCoding's complaints are valid. To the extent Clojure is not making the sale to a target audience that's already 98%" heteronormative eeeevil white male (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7581226), how likely are you to entice those outside that demographic? In fact, if you view Clojure as an experiment that may fail, are you doing them a favor by evangelizing it to them?

(I'd argue yes, since it's probably one of the easiest functional programming (FP) languages to learn, and it really helps to have FP in your toolkit. But I'd argue SICP or something gentler with multipardigm Scheme would be a better approach if you're just trying to accomplish that sort of thing.)

puredanger12y ago

The first two ClojureBridge (http://clojurebridge.org) workshops sold out quickly and many more cities are working on events in the coming months. In addition, 100s of people have signed up to help or attend on the mailing list. There is clearly demand in diverse communities to learn programming via Clojure.

I don't think any serious student should expect to learn only one language. Clojure can teach concepts that any learner will find valuable in applying to other languages. In particular, I think that clear separation of values, identity, and state avoids many kinds of complication in learning how to program that are introduced early with other languages.

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