I said "dip into", not "dive into" and by dip into I meant discovering I needed Java rather than a Clojure function.

I didn't mean to offend you. I don't know Clojure or Java, and was just wondering why you need to look into the internals of Clojure for something as basic as parseInt.

Clojure.core doesn't have a parse integer function. You use Java interop to get one. It's as simple as '(Integer/parseInt "42")'

You can use the built-in read-string too to generically read a string as Clojure data: `(read-string "42")`

The function is simple enough that clojure doesn't make its own wrapper for it, so you wind up doing this:

(.parseInt Integer x)

That may be what he means by dive into Java.