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Comment by nonrecursive | Hacker News Reader

Apologies if the title submitted to HN was confusing. The actual chapter title is "Do Things: a Clojure Language Crash Course" but I felt that was too verbose here. The text is explicit about what will be covered: "In this chapter, you're going to explore the elements which comprise this Lisp core: syntax, functions, and data."

Clojure language crash course is meant to distinguish these aspects from the other aspects of Clojure: the environment, the artifact ecosystem, and the mindset. I mention this distinction in the introduction: http://www.braveclojure.com/

Other chapters begin to cover the mindset, or how to do things the Clojure way. "The Joy of Clojure" also covers this, from what I understand. Rich Hickey's talks are also great, of course.

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I agree. Rich Hickey's talks are an excellent resource, and he refers to them as talks not as courses, even though he expects and hopes some people will learn something from them.

There's nothing to apologize for. It's just that it isn't a crash course, or a course of any kind for any meaningful meaning of "course".

And I meant what I said about the amount of effort and thought that the article represents being worthy of praise...and what I said about there being a need for actual courses in Clojure.

>It's just that it isn't a crash course, or a course of any kind for any meaningful meaning of "course".

It absolutely is a crash course, for the most common colloquial definition of the term "crash course," although in a very nitpicky fashion the blog entry is not a "true course of study." The reality is when people say "crash course" in common English they almost never mean a formal course of study. Usually it's used in the context of someone needing to learn something quickly in order to do something else. A professor might spend 10 minutes at the beginning of a class doing a "crash course" on binary arithmetic, because it's needed for something else that's on the lesson plan for the day. Such a crash course might have no exercises and no materials whatsoever, but nobody reasonable is going to object to the term.

The blog entry is focused, brisk, and thorough, the key elements of a course intended to be completed rapidly for a specific purpose. Does it fail to fill a learning gap that clojure needs filled? Probably. But that doesn't make it wrong to call it a crash course.

Typically a crash course is equal in content and student expectations to a normal course. What makes it a crash course is that it has a compressed time schedule. Courses with an emphasis on lightening the weight of the content typically are prefixed by "A Survey of", "An Introduction to", etc.

The professor covering binary arithmetic does not hear objections for several reasons. While the social context of the classroom and the explicit expert-novice relationship are among them, the analogy is undermined because teaching Clojure is not a precursor to teaching something else. In the article it is the end, itself.

Under the usage you are suggesting, "A crash course in the JVM" in the context of teaching Clojure would fit the analogy better.

Honestly, no, you're incorrect, at least in Australian English. A crash course is a turn of phrase, to denote being taught an overview of a topic in a short time, usually informally, with a focus on what is important to the students future endeavours in that area.

But I do apologize! It seems to me like this misunderstanding has made you a bit grumpy. I apologize if that's the case. If it's not, then I apologize for being wrong!

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