Informative talk and I really like the vision he presents in the beginning of it. I started with Clojure from python and while a lot of good things are present in python, I really miss the whole notion of "let's step back a bit and ponder whether we are on the right track or not" that is present in the Clojure community. Especially the core team.<p>If I could just get half of what's in Clojure trickle into the mainstream languages I'd be a happy bunny.
Stu's O'Reilly video "Clojure Inside and Out" (<a href="http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449368647" rel="nofollow">http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449368647</a>) is fascinating -- the first chapter (free) shows how to compose music with Overtone (<a href="http://overtone.github.io/" rel="nofollow">http://overtone.github.io/</a>). I've been programming in Clojure for the last year, but I had yet to experience Overtone. So cool.
Here's another recent Halloway talk: Concurrency in Clojure.<p><a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Concurrency-Clojure" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Concurrency-Clojure</a><p>Great high-level explanation of the spirit of Clojure and how/why it transcends place-oriented programming.
I think that Clojure has a great future, but the learning curve is steep. I have been using Clojure professionally for several years and I still feel like a Rookie. I have a mentoring job right now getting a very bright guy up to speed on both Clojure and the semantic web for his projects. He has a long hill to climb with Clojure but he is motivated and I think it will change his life as a developer in a good way.<p>I little off topic, but I know that Clojure is not the perfect language for me because I keep looking for better languages. I have been experimenting hard with DART in the last week and DART has the same nice "one language on client and server" feature that Clojure + Clojurescript provide. DART may or may not have a great future, but worth keeping an eye on. Also on some days, I feel like going back to Common Lisp or Smalltalk, but that is just crazy thinking :-)
I'm just starting to listen to this particular talk, but I want to comment now so this talk doesn't get buried.<p>I have to say that I'm very impressed with the Clojure community's eagerness to engage the real world in a way that most of my favorite languages haven't, while at the same time holding fairly firm on the things that matter (e.g. code readability and simplicity, referential transparency as a default, avoidance of OO traps).