Love Letter to Clojure

&gt; I will discuss the following:<p>&gt; * What the Second Ideal of Focus, Flow and Joy Means to Me Relearning Coding: How Coding Mostly Left My Daily Life in 2008, But Came Back in 2016 (or If I Can Learn Clojure, Anyone Can)<p>&gt; * Why I Love LISPs Now<p>&gt; * Functional Programming and Immutability (and John Carmack)<p>&gt; * A Mistake I’ve Been Making Since Grad School, and How I Fixed It: Composability<p>&gt; * The Epiphany I Had Reading “An Introduction to React in 2019 (For People Who Know Just Enough jQuery To Get By)”<p>&gt; * What Rich Hickey Says About Simplicity: Where The First Ideal Of Locality and Simplicity Comes From<p>&gt; * Solving Business Problems, Not Solving Puzzles—Why I Detest Doing Infrastructure Work These Days<p>&gt; * Lastly, the REPL…the Ultimate in Fast and Fun Feedback Loops!<p>&gt; * The Amazing Clojure Community, Parting Thoughts, and What I’d Like To Write About in the Future

I feel similarly to Gene Kim about Racket. Here&#x27;s a comparison ...<p>Gene Kim&#x27;s Clojure example:<p><pre><code> ; input is JSON string: &quot;{foo: 2}&quot; (defn xform [s] (-&gt; (js&#x2F;JSON.parse s) js-&gt;clj (update &quot;foo&quot; + 2) clj-&gt;js js&#x2F;JSON.stringify)) </code></pre> Racket equivalent:<p><pre><code> #lang racket (require threading json) ; input is (xform &quot;{\&quot;foo\&quot; : 2 }&quot;) (define (xform s) (~&gt; s string-&gt;jsexpr (hash-update &#x27;foo (λ (x) (+ 2 x))) jsexpr-&gt;string))</code></pre>

As someone fairly new to Clojure I agree entirely. There&#x27;s a freshness about the language that has brought a new sense of joy and curiosity back into the programming world. The language forces you to rethink, relearn, and reevaluate the way you fundamentally understand programming. I think for the better.

I use Racket to create programming languages, however I am considering getting into Clojure for web development. Racket&#x27;s web development ecosystem is actually pretty great, I&#x27;m just curious about Clojure&#x27;s.<p>Might someone who&#x27;s played with both give me some pro&#x27;s and con&#x27;s of Racket vs Clojure?

&gt; Contrast LISP to the complicated order of precedence operations you find in almost every other programming language, as well as their huge grammars and syntax. That takes a lot of brain space.<p>I disagree. I rarely find myself slowed down by the grammar or operator precedence in Java and C#. In C++, only when I have to do something rather esoteric (pointer-to-member, member function template specializations, etc.).<p>On the other hand, I critically rely on types. The IDE is able to narrow down suggestions about applicable methods to a handful. But since `js-&gt;clj` is a function `string -&gt; map` (a very generic signature), there must be hundreds of them with the same signature. Context-sensitive discoverability with the help of IDE becomes nearly useless.<p>Yes, that&#x27;s how I learn APIs these days. Types, intellisense + reading the documentation to learn about possible edge cases. I cannot imagine being productive in something like Clojure.<p>I also find Java 11 + VAVR rather pleasant to work with.