@nha certainly very interesting... but commuting to Bristol is just a bit too far for me 😞

dear employers, I’ll just say that I know a few brilliant Clojure devs living in Poland, who are not willing to move anywhere 😉 but would love to talk about remote opportunites 😉

Well, not many local Clojure shops in Poland : V

@jan.zy: out of curiosity, what part of Poland?

@thomas: even further for me!

eg. Podhale, Kaszuby, Warszawa

@jan.zy: Podhale and Kaszuby? Now that's something I didn't expect. I'm still sad there doesn't seem to be all that many Clojurians in Śląsk : C

heh there are many specialists in small villages all around Poland. My former company found >30 Scala (mostly) developers living outside big cities

apparently same goes for Clojure devs

@jan.zy: Maybe you're already aware, but there's #C06B40HMY .

yeah, i know,

but I’d like to see some more companies advertising there 😉

Hah, I would expect FP devs to be located near good universities like Warszawa or Kraków (Politechnika Śląska unfortunately sucks in that regard), so I'm kind of surprised. Anyway, I wholeheartedly recommend Polish devs, we're a pretty smart bunch over here ; )

there is no shortage of programmers there is shortage of employers who understand that remote workers are more efficient

why? FP is way easier to learn that OO

at any exp level

If you are already wired into imperative-mutable-OO mindset it's not as easy. I was lucky enough to learn about Haskell from a friend at my first year, so didn't have that problem.

And FP is certainly a better introduction to programming than C or Pascal my university course started with.

But even though it's better only good universities have courses in that. On PolSl I had a professor mistaking Haskell for a procedural language because hey, it has functions.

And no, not exaggerating.

lol

But on the flipside - this ensures that programmers that know functional languages learned them out of their own initiative, which is something to appreciate in a possible contractor, I think.

@jan.zy: not sure I agree that FP is easier. It may reduce incidental complexity but I think how easy you find it depends on your learning style, experiences, etc.

IMO with no previous experience explaining functional programming is easier than imperative programming. I'm kind-of teaching someone programming starting with "Haskell Programming from First Principles"'s first chapter (it has a really solid lambda calculus introduction) and so far it seems to be quite readily understandable.

I'm not sure if it would be so easy if I would have to explain variables, in-place mutability, step-by-step computation a la Turing machine and so on.

Lambda calculus being somewhat analogous to algebra certainly helps in grokking the concept easily.

I'm curious how it will go later when I move from lambda calculus to Racket and "How to Design Programs", but I'm hopeful.

Yeah I think that people with math backgrounds of some sort would understand the concept of functional programming more readily.

Well, the "maths background" in question is basically just high school maths, the person I'm trying to teach is majoring in psychology, so not all that much higher-level maths there.

I just think if you're learning algebra most of your school life, then functional programming is a fairly natural extension of that.

So just me that found it hard then 😉

@agile_geek: but IIRC you learned "normal" programming before functional, right?

I found it hard since I was way down the OO-swamp...

Right - but I am by no stretch of the imagination very capable at maths. In fact in school it was a real struggle.

Yeah, and I think it's the problem - when you learn thinking in the imperative way, then functional programming seems very counter-intuitive. As a gamedev-oriented friend at the university eloquently put it once "Functional programming? Lol, computers don't even work that way, dude.".

If you're a blank slate, functional programming feels like a more natural extension of the school curriculum thus far.

But that's just my opinion.

If an another friend didn't tell me about Haskell at my first year I can imagine myself being as mistified at FP now as they are.

Of course I'm also very, very old so it just might be senility!

Hahaha. Rather force of habit.

Please only jobs here

You wired your brain to think in the imperative way by doing it for however long you were doing it, so it's hard to re-wire it.

Oh, sorry : C

Just in case if anybody missed this clojure postion in LA http://www.builtinla.com/job/clojure-engineer