daslu

Great post.

The way Tablecloth unifies column processing and row processing in a functional way is so elegant.

I liked this demo by Timothy Pratley (the creator of Clojure Civitas): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lceazLPcSZg

Maybe it is good to use both the personal blog and public spaces like this. It is great that finally we have a common space for posting Clojure namespaces as notebooks, where different authors can be conveniently visible to each other, respond and follow up each other, and contribute to a somewhat unified set of knowledge.

One important detail is that in Lisps like Clojure, printed values can usually be read back as code. So, the REPL is really a read-eval-print-LOOP.

Another detail is that the whole culture of the language, oriented towards immutable data, makes it very easy to evaluate almost any sub-expression in your code, which makes the whole code introspectable in a very playful and dynamic way.

REPL-driven development is wonderful.

Clojure does have notebook solutions which are worth looking into: * https://github.com/clojupyter/clojupyter * https://github.com/jsa-aerial/saite * https://pink-gorilla.github.io (WIP, but is growing fast and going to be magnificent)

Some other projects are trying to connect the notebook idea with the REPL+editor experience. For example: * https://github.com/metasoarous/oz

By the way, we are having a Clojure data science public meeting at the end of this month: https://twitter.com/scicloj/status/1291845872884625408

We will assume some basic knowledge of Clojure, but I guess it may be interesting to join anyway.

Best wishes for the new role!

Eventually, it may be a good idea to try both Clojure and Python.

Personally I find Clojure's approach towards data very refreshing. It does require an open mind and a mindset different than usual. Eventually, this can bring joy, simplicity and power.

This article by Chris Nuernberger nicely explains what it is about: https://cljdoc.org/d/cnuernber/libpython-clj/1.2/doc/so-many...

Clojure's community is certainly smaller than Python's, but some say it is very friendly.

Below are some beginner-friendly places to chat about it. If you wish, let us chat there, dive into the details, and think how you could begin exploring.

Clojurians Zulip https://clojurians.zulipchat.com and especially the data-science stream: https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/151924-data-...

Clojureverse https://clojureverse.org

CIDER has been the best programming environment I have experienced (probably haven't tried enough of SLIME though). It combines coding with dynamic experimentation in such a fun way.

For literate programming, the Clojure/Clojurescript ecosystem keeps bringing up fascinating environments (in addition to CIDER+Org-mode and Clojupyter).

https://github.com/metasoarous/oz

https://github.com/jsa-aerial/saite

https://github.com/pink-gorilla/gorilla-notebook

are all actively developed and worth following, and they are all rather innovative in the ideas they bring to the table.

For polyglot reproducible literate programming, there is also https://nextjournal.com (implemented in Clojure/Clojurescript).

To add on what @valw said:

Clojure's ML/stats ecosystem is moving fast. Several important libraries are under construction and will mature in few months. Imho, it is worth following this year, for anyone interested in languages for ML/stats.

In addition to probabilistic programming libraries such as Metaprob and Anglican mentioned above, here are some libraries worth mentioning: https://github.com/MastodonC/kixi.stats https://github.com/generateme/fastmath https://github.com/techascent/tech.ml