>> The issue that is >> particularly interesting to me to explore is how alien Clojure is to >> Java programmers, what are subjective and objective causes, and how >> hard is to overcome each of the identified issues. > > This sounds very interesting. I try to explain the point of lisp to > java programmers from time to time and I find it very difficult. When > the conversation is about clojure I usually just point out that it's > made for multi core because that's easier to understand and a good > selling point, but that really doesn't have much to do with the lisp > aspect.
A year ago, I delivered a presentation about Clojure to a local Java user group. I talked about advantages of Lisp/Clojure and demonstrated Clojure's ability to interoperate with the Java libraries and code with which they were familiar. Everyone nodded their heads, said it was interesting and that they understood, and mostly forgot about it. http://ericlavigne.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/clojure-presentation-at-gatorjug/ A couple weeks ago, I used Clojure to win a contest sponsored by that group. In an afternoon, I wrote a web application in 100 lines of Clojure. http://ericlavigne.net:8054/ http://www.codetown.us/group/contesttown/forum/topics/wari-contest-1 http://github.com/ericlavigne/island-wari I was asked to discuss my code at the same group. We had no projector that day, so I actually wrote out my code, 10 lines at a time, on a whiteboard and explained how it worked. A lot of that time ended up being spent explaining various sequence functions like map, filter, and remove. Everyone was amazed at what Clojure could do with so little code. They were amazed by this strange, expression-oriented style of programming that didn't contain any statements. There was lots of discussion, and when I was busy writing more code the audience would break out into side discussions about coding style and whether concise code was even a good thing (one person claimed that they deliberately wrote verbosely so that they could understand their code later). One audience member said that he had already seen one Clojure presentation (mine) and two Scala presentations, and that he was finally having an "aha" moment and starting to understand what functional programming meant. They have asked me to continue talking about my little program next month, as everyone is still very curious about Clojure. My lesson: showing is better than telling.
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