Hi everyone,
yet another voice from Germany here (Cologne).
I’d like to call myself a philosopher turned programmer for reasons of sanity: After defending my PhD thesis about a year ago I was pretty worn out and felt like trying something new and different… or maybe not even all that different:
I had dabbled in programming before; tried my hand at Perl and Python but the only language that I’d always come back to turned out to be Emacs Lisp (which I learned via Conrad Barski’s fine book and used whenever some domestic job needed a programming solution). Somehow the Lisp way sat much better with me than the OOP stuff, in part because academically I had a background in formal Logic, including Lambda calculus.
But it was only after listening to talks like Are We There Yet?, where Rich Hickey references A.N.Whitehead, that I was totally hooked. Seeing some of the abstract concepts I was familiar with as an academic philosopher applied to real world problems in such a hands-on way was fascinating (one of my early professors was really big on Whitehead). Also, my main philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte constantly stresses the primacy of processes over things… so the centrality of functions resonated with me on many levels.
With my acadamic life taking a break I threw myself into learning Clojure with the immediate goal of doing some small time web development to keep my boat afloat… it has been a struggle, mostly because the underlying technology (HTTP, the DOM,…) is usually taught to newcomers using other languages than Clojure. So, of course, I got some basic JavaScript and some (very basic!) Java under my belt in order to at least know what I would be interopping with.
As of now I’d say 75% of my Code is Clojurescript (I use Macchiato for the backend), 20% is Clojure and 5% other stuff. Professionally it’s all freelance work, but more and more I would like to find actual colleagues I can share some experiences with. For the time being I’m really looking forward to doing this very thing right here! Of course I’ll chime in when I feel I have something to contribute, but most of all I’m eager to read more from the much more experienced and wiser folks around here!
Cheers!
(I am actually a green coffee guy, eating it raw and washing it down with water.)