Here’s some initial notes on coming to Clojure from Elixir. This isn’t meant to be a judgemental post. Its just my random thoughts on using a different model of functional programming. My bias would obviously be towards the one I know (Elixir). So its worth reading this with this background in mind. It’d be interesting to read someone’s thoughts on learning Elixir after using Clojure professionally. I’ve not found any blog posts about that although I’m sure there are some out there.

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.

Finishing up this small project to read a DynamoDB stream with Elixir. The github repo for the project is: dynamo_streamer. This post will cover generating random data to insert into the table and reading from the stream associated with the table.

Just made a small change to this project today since I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it and got involved in looking at Clojure. The project now has some of the standard dependencies you regularly see in “real” Elixir project: excoveralls, dialyxer, credo, ex_doc. And I’ve refactored table.ex to be more general purpose and moved the creation of the actual test table for this project to user_activity.ex.

It’s really easy to get distracted by a new thing in software development. There’s always some person or group that has developed something that really is objectively remarkable. So, if you are a curious software developer, how do you choose what it is you’d like to look at in more detail? Well there’s no one right answer to that. One interesting approach that I’ve heard about in conference talks and read about on the web is to develop your own personal tech radar. The first time I heard about this was from CloudWatch.