Guide to Programming Clojure For Beginners

Re:Guide to Programming Clojure For Beginners by dusklight on Wednesday June 29, 2011 @04:55PM (#2711270)

I don't know if this is the right time to be introducing clojure to beginners yet. The language is still undergoing some basic fundamental changes. If you look at 1.3 there is so much that is different and breaks stuff from 1.2 and before. Right now the main strength of clojure is that the only people using it are the people who are good enough at shipping real software to understand why it's worth the trouble. I would hate for it to become the next fashionable "me too" language like Ruby and get punished by being stuck with supporting too many newbies.

Ruby got stuck at 1.8.6 for so long because it was really difficult to introduce code breaking changes in new versions, due to the number of people who were already using it. It would be better to evangelize clojure after the clojure/core team is closer to finalizing the language design and has shifted focus to performance and growing the ecosystem.

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Re:Guide to Programming Clojure For Beginners by swannodette on Wednesday June 29, 2011 @05:10PM (#2711354)

Having survived the transitions from pre-1.0 -> 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.3, there's been surprisingly little in the way of breakage, usually just a bit of search and replace.

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Re:Guide to Programming Clojure For Beginners by technomancy on Wednesday June 29, 2011 @05:31PM (#2711454)

The changes in 1.3 (which honestly should have been called 2.0) have caused a lot of upheval to people using the alpha releases. Even things as basic as ring-devel were broken. But new users should have enough sense to stick with the stable releases. Now that 1.3 has entered beta the number of libraries that remain unpatched are few and far between. It's the folks who are using git master in the middle of the release cycle who are feeling the pain, not the newbies.

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