Clojurians Log v2
introduce-yourself
Hi everyone! I'm Shantanu 👋 I'm currently a junior dev working mainly in Kotlin & TypeScript for the past 3 years. I've been interested in LISPs and MLs ever since I started looking into functional programming via SICP, etc. I've learned the basics of Clojure and now I've been wanting to start doing some projects in it, although I can't help but feel I'm still carrying over some of my Kotlin coding style over to Clojure in a non-idiomatic sense, If anybody has any guidance/advise on how they managed to learn the idioms of the language I would be greatly appreciative 🙏 (I've been thinking of following along 2 books in series, Living Clojure and then Clojure Applied) Thanks for having me!!
for me the most valuable lesson i learned was that if you get used to functions and know what it means to have functions as first class citizen you see that most patterns and abstractions can be done in functions too. Macros on the other hand just extend that in the matter of you can let the macro write code (functions) for you. Furthermore regarding the coding style function chaining or better explained as plugging just functions together to make something new is the main way of clojure. Variables are seldomly used afaik. A good rule of thumb i learned for me (maybe i'm wrong) keep the functions small. It sounds counter intuitive at first but it pays out in the long run cause it supports the explorative coding style. But thats just my 5 cents. One more thing i would reccomend look up some code from others. You'll learn a ton. And last but not least share 'scrappy fiddles'
I tried tackling Advent of Code puzzles in Clojure so I'd have something "practical" (and fun) to experiment with. I got a lot of value watching skilled Clojure devs code (lambda island videos, parens of the dead) as well. And this podcast: https://clojuredesign.club/ It's a slow burn, but over time, I felt like Christoph and Nate rewired my brain 😅
firstly i'll say that I am not a programmer nor do I have any formal background in programming. my background is in philosophy and have just returned to the states after a many-year stint in japan to spend a few semesters at georgetown university in washington dc. what draws me to clojure is twofold: my near-term focus on the philosophy of science and and logic plus the curious fact that few other programming language communities value the scientific and socratic methods. the search for tools to augment my logic studies naturally led me to a whirlwind survey of the programming languages landscape and my proclivities made clojure the natural choice. unfortunately, it seems that I arrived in town too late to attend the latest conference but i've already queued up a few yt videos to watch and will spend some quality time to locate the best in class logic software for clojure. i value any recommendations on that front.
👋 Hi! Are you a fellow Popperian? 😃
my exposure to popper has so far gone no deeper than expedient surveys. I suspect that i will become more intimate with his work in the near future.
I’m not super deep into Popper. I do find his theory of mind and epistemology to be spot on and so important that I think humanity ignores it at its own peril. Yeah, sounds like hyperbole, but that’s where I am. 😃
humanity is very good at ignoring at its peril