Clojure Learning Resources + Post Your Clojure Insights

[Pkeod]

Now that the source is available, it is time for some of us more to gitgud with Clojure so that we can contribute to improving the editor!

Official series by @mats.gisselson https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXsXu5srjNlxI7b2smnHxDeMMwR4mVZ2m

The Clojure tutorial videos we posted on YouTube starts out quite slow as I try to cover a lot of fundamentals and how to set up a dev environment, etc. But they build up towards the final video where I talk about how to solve actual problems in Clojure. In the final video I walk through how I build a simple Missile Command game in Clojure with just a single atom for the game state. Everything is modeled in terms of data transformations and then rendered to a JavaFX canvas. Even if you cannot bear watching through the entire series, you might get something out of watching the last installment and then maybe revisit the earlier episodes for clarification.

Clojure is quite a departure from most languages, but very rewarding. Learning it has changed how I approach problems in other languages as well. You have to kind of get past the initial hangups of the syntax and sometimes unconventional function names (I.e. if and for do not mean quite what you’d expect - if is more like expr ? yes : no, and for is like a Python list comprehension). The syntax still turns a lot of people off at the start, though. It helps to have good tooling for the syntax to go down better. Calva seems like good plugin for Visual Studio Code. I prefer the Cursive plugin with IntelliJ Community Edition, but Cursive costs a bit of money. It is just one guy maintaining it and he basically made it his job. I like supporting him.

There’s also a light-hearted online book called “Clojure for the Brave and True” here: https://www.braveclojure.com/

• https://github.com/defold/defold/blob/dev/editor/README.md
• https://github.com/defold/defold/blob/dev/editor/README_CURSIVE.md
• http://www.joyofclojure.com/
• https://elementsofclojure.com/
• http://clojurescriptkoans.com/
• http://clojure-doc.org/articles/tutorials/introduction.html
• http://app.klipse.tech/
• http://www.4clojure.com/
• https://kimh.github.io/clojure-by-example/

If you find a learning resource, or useful tool related to Clojure please post it. If you have some useful Clojure insights please post them here. I’ll do the same as I learn and discover useful things.

[SpencerWF]

Thank you for this. I’ve been trying to look at some of the editor issues and have struggled as I’ve never used Clojure before.

Do you know what the advantages are of Clojure over other languages?

[Pkeod]

That’s a big question. The small answer to it is with languages in the family of Clojure you can do more with less work.