Situations when you can sit together with the learner of Clojure is much different from when they are supposed to find material and run tutorials on their own. Last Friday I spent 2 hours introducing a colleague to Clojure. A proficient Scala developer, in the immutability camp. He screen shared and fired up Calva's Getting Started REPL. But we broke us out of its path almost immediatelly. Almost the first thing I taught him was ”inline def” to debug a simple function. It was all we ever got to do during the full session. And it was amazing. His questions took us to • the Clojure Reader • special forms • force remove parens with alt+backspace • but better to learn to paredit slurp (no more alt+backspace during the rest of the session) • Clojure code is data • macros • expanding macros • quoting Clojure code • what does the namespace look like? • removing things from the namespace • binding things in the namespace • local scope • binding local scope to the namespace makes it available to the REPL • the cond macro expands to if forms in a recursive way • the comment macro just has en empty body • special forms and macros can't be passed as arguments • expand-macro is fun • ... and so on and so forth I heard him giggle several times when the REPL let him know about things he wondered. We both had the best end of Friday workday ever.

I had missed this playlist. Wonderful pace. A bit Zen 😀 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI-mrGTUXmHXeKhy6UGdDxIKwM8L4MTbq