Getting Clojure

What Hacker News says

1. silver-arrowDec 2020
   This is an excellent comment and it matches my experience with the language very closely. After a career with many languages and paradigms (C, C++, Java, javascript, Swift...), then pushed to do Clojure the past 3 years, all the points you make above became so obvious that is in now EXTREMELY painful to work in any of the other languages.

   I think a couple pain points need to be remedied in the community so that Clojure is more inviting to the general programmer, who like you mentioned would ultimately have an easier time with Clojure once bootstrapped into the language.

   The primary one for me was being met with Emacs out of the gate as the preferred and touted editor for Clojure. I dove into that for a good year, became proficient with it but sorely regretted it. It was a decision point and cognitive hurdle I wish wasn't even presented to me in the beginning. IntelliJ/Cursive or something like it is a better way for most newcomers.

   Earlier books on Clojure were way to "intellectual" in my opinion and pretty offputting to the general programmer. Luckily that area has improved in recent years with books such as "Getting Clojure" and "Programming Clojure"

   Also the newcomer could be confused about what a repl is and how it functions with the IDE or editor. It would be better if editors and plugins focused on raw Socket or prepl repls over middleware repls like nrepl.

   I would hope actually that some resources in the community would make an awesome LSP Server for Clojure so that any editor that supports LSP would have a great Cursive like experience. "clojure-lsp" is a great start but needs more resources.

   The points made above by puredanger are so very true in my experience and I am so lucky and joyful to be working on Clojure systems.

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2. zenlotAug 2019
   Clojure. Started with "Getting Clojure" book and can't recommend it enough. Written in a clear and practical style.
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3. pixelperfectJun 2019
   Getting Clojure by Russ Olsen. It's the most recently published of the introductory Clojure books and imo the best written.
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4. puredangerAug 2018
   Getting Clojure (Russ Olsen), Clojure for the Brave and True (Daniel Higginbotham), Living Clojure (Carin Meier), and Programming Clojure (me, Stuart Halloway, Aaron Bedra) are the best intro books, in my opinion.
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5. nobleachJul 2026
   I particpated in a Clojure reading group for "Getting Clojure" back around 2017. Having the entire JVM ecosystem available, is absolutely a great benefit. I even fooled around with ClojureScript a bit. David Nolen is great at making the case for both.
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6. nobleachOct 2023
   I haven't been a Ruby programmer for 10 years but I totally agree on Eloquent Ruby. I sure did love that book. I still pick it up sometimes and thumb through it. I did a reading group for Getting Clojure (another book by Russ Olsen) just because I knew he wrote it.

   I totally agree. I have to remind myself often, I may not like the tool, but if I allow myself to get competent with it, I can complete any job. The more I sit around and hate it, the less effective I am.

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