>> 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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