Reasons to Learn Clojure

quora.com

10 points·lpolovets··4 comments

Someone on Quora asked about the advantages of learning Clojure. I'm a Clojure newbie, but my team at work uses Clojure heavily so I polled them for their thoughts and summarized the results. Please let me know if you have any questions about Clojure or our experience with it, and I'll try to answer them (or ask someone who I work with to answer them).

Interesting article. I've been toying with the idea of learning a LISP lately and you sold me. What is a good route to explore this? I.e., what should I install(I run Linux/OSX and Windows) and what are some real world applications? Also, do you recommend any books or online resources?

Installing Clojure is pretty easy (http://clojure.org/getting_started) and you can get far with the REPL. After you've played around a bit, you will probably starting using lein (like maven/ant, but for Clojure), which handles REPL startup, dependency management, JAR building, etc.

For IDEs, I really like IntelliJ + the La Clojure plugin. Many of my coworkers us Emacs + Swank/SLIME. I'm not an emacs user and don't know much about that setup, but it's a very popular setup.

A book that I liked a lot is Clojure in Action (http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Action-Amit-Rathore/dp/1935182...). I've also heard that The Joy of Clojure is excellent, but it's more appropriate after you're already comfortable with Clojure.

As for online resources, I've found https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans to be very useful. You can clone the project, which consists of a lot of "fill-in-the-blank" unit tests. The tests are designed to teach you the common functions and data structures available in Clojure.

Thanks for the awesome answer. My girlfriend and my weekend are not pleased with you but I'm pretty excited to explore this. Thanks again!

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