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Comment by llambda | Hacker News Reader

> I am interested in learning clojure. Unfortunately the learning material online is very scanty.

You might give 4Clojure a try[1]. It's a series of programming problems that in the process of challenging you attempt to teach you the syntax and usage. It starts off very basic so even if you know no programming at all it may still be useful.

[1] https://www.4clojure.com/

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From the link you just gave. The emphasis seems to be more on teaching mathematics through programming.

Do you seriously expect me or any other serious programmer in a business environment sorting a million integers in a million different ways?

How do I open files, how do I search what I want through regexps? How do write back? How can I build socket based programs? How can I interact with databases? How can write to log files? How can I work with business logic? How do I interact with webservices? API's? How to I work with operating system commands? etc stuff.

I make a living programming for those sort of stuff and wish to leverage any language in that direction.

Perl, Python tutorials teach me to do real work in a real production environment now. Not mathematics for my college assignments.

I hope you are able to understand. If that stuff is absent, I have to now take the pain of figuring that out myself.

> Do you seriously expect me or any other serious programmer in a business environment sorting a million integers in a million different ways?

Well my apologies for not immediately understanding your specific situation... I can assure you I meant it as a kind suggestion.

Perhaps you could look at Clojure In Action[1]? It's supposed to be a pragmatic introduction for people with some existing programming experience. From the Amazon page, "is a hands-on tutorial for the working programmer who has written code in a language like Java or Ruby, but has no prior experience with Lisp."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Action-Amit-Rathore/dp/1935182...

You might learn that if you want to learn any of those things in clojure understanding these concepts really help. The librarys of clojures are all build on these functional concepts. You will have a much harder time understanding the librarys if you think you can only look at how to call some api. All the business logic that I write in Clojure uses these concepts, there is a reason for this stuff.

Clojure is not python and not java, the fundamental concept is diffrent. If you allready understand these concepts just go to github and look at the librarys for logging, databases and other stuff. How to use a library you can learn looking at the documentation of the library, learning how to programm idiomatic clojure needs some training.

You need to learn enough Java to get around, and how to interact with it through Clojure. Java libraries are very comprehensive and well documented, but if you're fresh to both languages the learning curve is steep.

It's sorta possible to get around with pure Clojure, but not very practical.

Leiningen is the de-facto package manager so use that for everything. Clojars and Maven are the two repositories.

man you're far away to be a good programmer..you first need learn how thinking and how convert your ideas to code and then you can learn the simple stuff (open files, search through regexps) I learned first ruby, python and javascript and know I'm learnig haskell and clojure...learning any functional language is very different to the rest...you need how think and how express it in a functional way...that's the hard part..but when you learn this then write ANY code is so simple, elegant and expressive...4clojure and functional lang don't intend teach you how program: they intend you learn how think in a different way than let you write faster, elegant and explicit code (you can resolve any problem in 4clojure using your knwledge in javascript or python and writing the code using procedural algorithms, but you will notice than thats way is ugly, more verbose and less clear

"Do you seriously expect me or any other serious programmer in a business environment sorting a million integers in a million different ways?" well...Yes!!...today almost any app need than you work with thousand data...unless your goal be write javascript widgets or client side apps..you will need know how work with big data, how transform this and analize it...

I work with ruby, javascript (and coffeescript) and now I'm using clojure and haskell..and now I'm impressed how I can write many things than in imperative or procedural langs could take many lines in functional langs it takes me 2 or 3 lines..and they are very clear and self explicit

Everyone else already said it, but you are completely dead wrong. Very little of the stuff on 4Clojure has anything to do with mathematics. It is about teaching you the standard library, concepts which are as common and fundamental in Clojure as std::map is in C++ or as list comprehensions are in Python. Without learning the stuff on 4Clojure, you will not be able to productively do anything with the data that comes back from the database, or transform data for delivery to a web service.

You can criticize it for being too much to learn, if you like, and keep writing Perl and Python. That might be a fair criticism, insofar as it would be nice to have a better-paved road to mastery coming from the land of imperative languages. But you can't criticize it for being abstract or unnecessary for programming in Clojure. It is not.

Others have pointed out that you need to understand sequences and other basic Clojure stuff first but perhaps my "real world Clojure" blog post series will give you a quick tour of the sort of things you're looking for?

http://corfield.org/search/real+world+clojure

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