Clojure

a deeply influential figure in functional programming and language design.

Bedra was a core contributor to the Clojure and Clojure script, and co-authored the definitive reference book, Programming Clojure.

Grounded in functional programming principles, language theory, and quantitative risk modeling, his work focuses on building high assurance, resilient architectures that satisfy complex business and regulatory demands without compromising speed or system integrity.

And the thing that's left out is that Aaron used to work at Sigital with me 25 million years ago.

There has to be a very strong technical reason to choose a different tool, I think, because anybody who's a good programmer should be able to write any language now And I would say broadly read the code.

Unless it's something completely, I mean, let's take Clojure or any kind of Lisp, but any of like, let's say the C derivatives, you know, like if you know how to read TypeScript, could you not, you really couldn't read C sharp at all? Like you would look at that and it would just be completely foreign to you.

I don't know.

That's my opinion on that.

But just if you don't read about go.

You don't have to have written Go, but you may not get an appreciation for that technique and why that was chosen there versus a language that does have pattern matching, a functional language, for example.

And then you could go to something like Clojure or Common Lisp and just have your brain totally broken by the way that it handles programming.

And when we talk about Dynamic types and static types, reading about practical object-oriented programming as a book, I think is great because it teaches you how to use dynamic types versus outright rejecting them.

I think maybe.

What about Clojure?

Oh, Clojure, maybe, yeah.

Again, I'm out of...

Apologies if I get stuff wrong.

Oh, yeah.

He had worked extensively in languages like Clojure and Python, but he found himself hitting a wall trying to teach Haskell to beginners.

Which is where Julie comes in.

Exactly.

But the kicker is he didn't use Java to fix it.

He spun up a Clojure REPL to bypass all those usual deployment delays.

And we should probably explain what that is, because it's totally crucial to understanding how he moved so fast.

Yeah.

So good.

So welcome to The Deep Dive.

Today we are exploring Bevilacqua-Linn's book, Functional Programming Patterns in Scala and Clojure.

And the mission of this deep dive is to help you cross the bridge from the traditional kind of bulky, object-oriented programming world into the lean, highly expressive world of functional programming.

This was before Scala was a thing.

This was before Clojure was a thing.

We were one of the first ones.

Austin Groovy were kind of the two big languages that people were using.

To me, the game changer was Java 8, in my opinion.

And I remember coming back from a trip telling myself, why do I care? I've seen Scala, I've seen Groovy, I've seen Clojure.

All these languages have Clojures and Lambdas.

Big deal that Java has Lambdas.

And I came back from one of my trips.