I decided to spend some time learning Clojure. I figured I’d install and find some good doc or an online book to work with. The install itself was quite painless. The computer I’m using for this is a Macbook pro and I’ve got homebrew installed. You’ll need to install Java (which I already had) and then installing Clojure is just brew install clojure. After reading the docs one of the first things you’ll realize is that you need a tool called leiningen. Installing that is also just brew install leiningen. The online book I found is Clojure for the Brave and True. Its funny and well organized and seems up to date enough. I also signed up for an exercism account which has a Clojure track for algorithm practice once I get some actual chops with the language itself.

At the moment here’s the real limited amount of things I know so far:

• There’s a repl in Clojure
• The syntax is Lisp like. opening parenthesis, operator, operands, closing parenthesis.
• The Clojure web site is pretty and looks well organized.
• There’s a Slack Channel
• Data structures are not the focus (It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures. —Alan Perlis). This is a common functional programming language mantra.
• Functions are first class citizens
• Error messages are computereese

clojure-noob.core=> ("test" 1 2 3)
Execution error (ClassCastException) at clojure-noob.core/eval1673 (form-init15352419622516719568.clj:1).
class java.lang.String cannot be cast to class clojure.lang.IFn (java.lang.String is in module java.base of loader 'bootstrap'; clojure.lang.IFn is in unnamed module of loader 'app')

• This is saying that “test” isn’t a function.

Going to continue working thru the book (which again seems terrific!) and see how far I get into Clojure-land. Still Clojure-curious I guess.