At this year's Java forum in Stuttgart,
I was one of 1100 geeks who divulged in
Suebian Brezeln and presentations on all things Java.
After a
presentation on Scala,
I passed by a couple of flipcharts which were set aside for birds-of-a-feather (BoF)
sessions. On a whim, I grabbed a free flipchart and scribbled one word:
Clojure. In the official program, there was no presentation
covering Clojure, but I thought it'd be nice to meet a few people who, like me,
are interested in learning this new language and its concepts!
Since I had suggested the topic, I became the designated moderator for this session. It
turned out that most attendees didn't really know all that much about Clojure or Lisp - and so
I gravitated, a bit unwillingly at first, into presentation mode. Boy, was I glad that right
before the session, I had refreshed the little Clojure-fu I have by reading an
article or two.
In fact, some of the folks who showed up had assumed the session was on clo
sures
(the programming concept)
rather than Clo
jure, the language
But the remaining few of us still had a spirited
discussion, covering topics such as dynamic versus static typing, various Clojure language
elements, Clojure's Lisp heritage, programmimg for concurrency, web frameworks, Ruby on Rails,
and OO databases.
To those who stopped by, thanks a lot for this discussion and for your interest.
And to the developer from Bremen whose name I forgot (sorry): As we suspected, there is
indeed an alternative syntax for creating Java objects in Clojure.
(.show (new javax.swing.JFrame)) ;; probably more readable for Java programmers
(.show (javax.swing.JFrame.)) ;; Clojure shorthand