Hi, I’m Chris from Germany.
I’ve been writing code since I was a kid, I’m in my early thirties now so that’s about 25 years of programming experience. I love learning new programming languages and have played around with about 60 so far, but I’m only really good (fluent you could say) with a handful of course. Although good might be a bit of an exaggeration, the bad thing about learning so many languages is that it kept me from really mastering the few I actually use
My journey with Clojure started very early when it was still new, maybe a month old but I can’t remember, I played around with it for quite some time and really loved the language, but I mainly develop end user desktop applications and websites, so Java is not something that was usable for me. While there are some great desktop apps written in Java, they are the rare exception since you need a lot of know how to make Java apps look and feel like users expect (I think it’s easier now with JavaFX but I have no experience with that, yet!).
I moved on to JavaScript / node-webkit development (which today is better known as Electron, it’s not exactly a fork but it’s basically the same, the core developer of node-webkit was contracted by Github to create Electron as far as I know). I tried to use ClojureScript but back when it was new it was just a pain to setup projects using ClojureScript, so I moved on to CoffeeScript and really got to like CoffeeScript’s Python-like syntactic whitespace.
When Zach Oakes’ Lightmod came out a month ago, an all-in-one Clojure/ClojureScript IDE, I tried ClojureScript again and this time it finally clicked for me since Lightmod makes it trivially easy to use it, and even takes care of balancing parentheses by using the syntactic whitespace I like so much!
Now I’m fully back on the Clojure(Script) train, having written close to 2k lines of code in it (using Reagent) over the past month, and already published two projects with it, or three if you count my private homepage / blog. I’m still learning of course since I haven’t used Clojure in a long time and wasn’t that good with it back then to begin with, but now with such great tools like Lightmod/Nightlight and Reagent it’s just super fun to work with and learn.