Introduce yourself!

Hi everyone,

I’m Andrew Oberstar from Minnesota in the US. My experience is mostly on the JVM: lots of Java, a good amount of Groovy, and then I started dabbling in Scala and Clojure. Clojure’s the one that stuck (for hobby work) and I’ve been poking around with it for the last few years. My day job is a very stodgy corporate environment (Java based), so my Clojure work is all in my spare time. I’ve really enjoyed the numerous Rich Hickey talks and Clojure books. This language and community really speak to the ideas that I feel are most important (for the kinds of programs I enjoy working on).

I’m easily distracted from building applications by tooling issues, so my open source projects tend to be in that space. I’ve been building Gradle plugins for many years and finally have made progress (with the other devs) on one for Clojure (gradle-clojure). It’s still in it’s early days, but is functional enough for basic Clojure development.

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Hello!

My name is Jason Sich from Kalamazoo, MI in the US. I’ve done a lot of random things from software development for aerospace to collaborative drawing apps for the iPad. Currently my day job involves working on a large Rails app. I’ve been using Clojure/ClojureScript casually for the past 2 years. My interest came about after getting tired of working with complex classes, inheritance, types and architecture in .NET. I spent awhile doing JavaScript & NodeJS and eventually found Clojure/ClojureScript after working in React for a bit. I was hooked after listening to a few Rich Hickey & David Nolen talks. I’ve been mostly focused on web clients and have been building out a few side projects using re-frame.

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Hello, my name is Børge from Norway!

I’ve been using Clojure since 2014, mainly for web stuff. I’ve been using a lot of other languages as well (PHP, Python, Java, C#, and JavaScript mainly), but after discovering Clojure it has been my go-to language when starting a new project.

My main interests outside of programming is music and fishing.

My latest project was a voice chat for language learners using WebRTC, but I gave up on it due to the amount of users it would have needed to be useful. The unfinished code can be found on github for those that are interested: backend-repo, frontend-repo

I sometimes tweet.

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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 :slight_smile:

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! :slight_smile:

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.

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Impressive that you have been programming for so long >.<

I love CoffeeScript and ClojureScript too. I started learning programming with Python and CoffeeScript in 2010, and switched to ClojureScript in late 2015. I made myself a tiny virtual DOM library after using Reagent for a while, would you like to try http://respo.site/ .

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Respo looks really cool, I bookmarked the site, I’ll check it out once I’m done learning Reagent & re-frame. Don’t want to do too many things at the same time, I have a tendency to do that and it never works out well :smiley:

Yeah my programming life has been quite an adventure starting back on the Amiga 500 with Basic :slight_smile: For a while when I was just out of school I thought I’m done with programming, just got bored with it, but Ruby brought me back into it, made programming fun again for me.

From there I went to Objective-C and Smalltalk-80 which Ruby was greatly influenced by. Clojure was the first Lisp I ever tried I think, I checked out Racket, Haskell and Elm after Clojure to learn more about functional programming (I much prefer Clojure though). And somewhere in between Rebol, which was originally based on Scheme so it’s distantly related to Lisps.

Its modern incarnation Red is really cool, it’s a systems programming language but as easy to use as a high level language like Ruby/Python. Basically Rust for mere humans. And has the easiest cross platform native GUI programming I’ve ever seen. GUI hello world? One line: view [button “Say hello” [print “Hello world!”]]. And that compiles to a tiny native .exe for Windows and .app for macOS (the Linux maintainer went AWOL so it doesn’t do GUI on Linux yet). I hope other languages like Clojure adopt that model of GUI programming one day, Rebol & Red show that GUI programming can be made easy and fun and only as complex as you need it to be.

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Hello, I’m John (Closer to 40 than 30), and I am not actually a programmer, more like interested party. But here’s my (long) story:

I was first introduced to programming via Quickbasic on DOS, did something really simple and stupid stuff and one actually really complicated “3D first person” dungeon crawler. Basically a really simplified computer generated maze in the vein of Dungeon Master RPG (1987). About 99% of that code was to get the weird drawing code to draw something that looked vaguely like a corridor with few white lines. Fugly stuff. I honestly don’t remember much about it, as I was really young.

Then I watched my friend start learning Pascal, then C, and Assembler, and then C++. We made bunch of small games, one with just pure assembler. I mostly listened to his explanations and helped brainstorming, but had no idea how to code. I did all the other stuff. Doing music with Tracker, Art, etc. All I knew that just from all his talk and from what I could see, I NEVER wanted to touch C++ or C. That seemed like the dumbest language known to mankind.

Forward some 5-10 years, and I decide that I want to learn to program at least a little. I looked at C, went “nope”, and then checked Python, tried it for a bit, did a plain text editor with it, and went “nope”, then tried Ruby… and nope.

You have to understand, I didn’t actually LEARN these languages, I just fiddled around with them until something happened and used bunch of tutorials as a crutch.

But then I learned about Lisp and started learning Common Lisp. I actually got fairly well into it, far enough that I understood the concepts fully and I got a real education in Vectors, Hash Maps, Lists and all that. I did some data manipulation code that handled inventory calculations (related to work), etc. That was the first time I actually learned to program anything without a crutch. But it didn’t take too long, maybe a year, into my journey into CL until I noticed that I couldn’t actually do anything useful with it.

I mean, anything modern you wanted to create with CL would require interfacing with some foreign C/C++ library for graphics/UI. And doing stuff without GUI was about as far from interesting as I could imagine. Despite using some libraries, tutorials, etc, to get GUI/et al – I finally gave up on it. Probably around when Clojure was very new, but I wasn’t really interested in it, or truly aware what it even meant.

Years pass.

Then about 3 years ago, I program something ridiculously stupid on Twine 2, because of a bet. It was a nightmare to code on Twine, because I didn’t want to touch Javascript. I had looked at Javascript once, and that was more than enough for me to swear to never touch it. So I used the inbuilt language (forget the name) but it only had global variables and huge limitations on how to do things. While I wasn’t a coder, I knew the concepts and had coded in the past – so I actually was very aware of the limitations.

So I got it done, but I figured that I really needed something more user friendly if I ever need to do something like that again. So I looked around, and somehow (I don’t remember how) I found Clojure. Saw Rich Hickey’s talk,“Are we there yet?” and went: “Damn, man, you got a point.” Gave the language a shot, and after the initial floundering of “WTF? Immutable?” I fell in love.

I love that Clojure has Opinions, with capital letter. That means it doesn’t just drop you off and say “here you go: stuff, do something with it, maybe”, it actually says “this is how things are done, deal with it”. I also love that it’s much more concise than CL ever was. It was real drag to write something like “hash-table-rehash-threshold” or “least-positive-normalized-double-float”. Okay, fairly extreme examples, but as a example CL “defun” is in Clojure “defn”, this goes all around the code. Also it uses “[” and “]” to good effect to clean up the code representation, also “{” and “}”. It’s very important to me that the code looks clean and legible.

I now use mostly Clojurescript + Reagent + Figwheel to do easy GUI stuff for myself. Possibly do a game some day, because why not?

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speaking of “easy”, I would always recommend shadow-cljs, less time to deal error messages from Java. :smile:

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Hello!

I’m a designer and developer working at a small healthcare startup in Chicago. We’ve chosen Clojure/Script for quite a few of our projects, and we’ve even had the opportunity to extend existing Rails and React/Redux applications with Clojure.

I’m also into art and music, so I’ve been experimenting with stuff like leipzig and the thi.ng libraries.

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Hello there!

I’m Dieter Komendera, @kommen on most internet things (twitter, github), based in Vienna, Austria and working on nextjournal.com.

So far my Clojure experience is limited, since we only started using Clojure itself this summer. We do use ClojureScript for something like 1 1/2 years now for the nextjournal editor, which eventually led us to Clojure. Now already a good part of the backend is in Clojure based on pedestal and Datomic.

If you’re interested in the journey to ClojureScript my college Philipp gave a talk about it at the Vienna React meetup last year which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Q5D6mI-34

Before I’ve been doing Ruby/Rails development for the better part of the last 10 years, with a lot of iOS/ObjC/Swift and a bit of Erlang/Elixir and Javascript mixed in. (notice: no Lisp in there)

I can tell you that I’m pretty much sold on the whole Clojure and ClojureScript experience. Beginning from what the simplicity of the language gives you, to the powerful standard library, the a major and stable ecosystem and the awesome community.

So much for now, I’m looking forward to the Clojure-ride ahead, to participate in this community, to learn more and give back what we learned.

Cheers!

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Hi everyone!

I’ve been using Clojure for a few years on and off, professionally and personally. My current project is to create an interface to play the board game Codenames online (like horsepaste.com, which is written in Go + JS). I’ve made the backend and the UI, and am currently working on the client/server interactions. I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s a lot of fun!

Outside of Clojure, I’m interested in Emacs, meditation, productivity, and chess. I’m also starting a new business, Hostwriting.

Michael

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We talk a lot about Community with a capital C, but all it really is is people, lots of people just like you and me, all bringing their own unique voice to the table. Introducing yourself means people get to know a little more about you, so that you’re no longer a stranger, but a real human sitting on the other side of the screen.

If you’re new here, or you’ve been around for a while but haven’t introduced yourself yet then this is your chance. Tell us your story!

Some ideas of what you can share:

(repeatedly #(rand-nth [
"your journey towards Clojure"
"the things you’re working on"
"where you’re from or where you live"
"you elsewhere on the web (home page, Twitter or Github account)"
"how people can support you"
"any particular hobbies or interests"
"anything else you like to share"
]))

This month in particular you can also answer: What do you plan to achieve in 2018?

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Edited now with syntax highlight :slight_smile:

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Software artist, working in visuals and music, collaborating with visual designers, sculptors and choreographers. Most of my work is Clojure-based (and currently a lot of WebGL) though I’m also pretty fond of Python and work in Java, MaxMSP, etc. Lots more info here: http://cassiel.com

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My name is Sean and I’m doing a bunch of crazy things this year.

Last month I sold my condo in Southern California and me, my wife and dog set out across the US to see all 59 national parks. We’re up to 7 so far:

  1. Capitol Reef
  2. Arches
  3. Canyonlands
  4. Mesa Verde
  5. Black Canyon of the Gunnison
  6. Great Sand Dunes
  7. Petrified Forest

Living on the road and working remotely full time (not writing clojure) while maintaining my latest, best-est, rails-inspired clojure full stack web framework coast on clojure presents it’s own set of challenges, but it wasn’t enough, so I also decided to ship a new project using coast every month this year. I’m basically hell bent on trying to use clojure to make money on the web as a solo founder this year.

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My name is Steven, and I’m pretty much a beginning programmer (meaning I’m not a pro). I’ve been doing mostly Ruby lately but am intrigued by Clojure and Lisps in general. I can’t quite remember how I first heard about Clojure (though it’s only been a few weeks), but I do remember discovering SICP, installing GNU Scheme and playing around with that. I’m definitely not yet “worthy” when it comes to solving CS-level programming problems.

The whole idea of functional programming and a Lisp-like, full-stack experience on the JVM is a great thing that I want to learn more about.

So far I have installed Leiningen and have been playing with the REPL. I come from a Linux background, so the command line and Vim are things I’m very comfortable with, and that means I’ve avoided Emacs until now. I got halfway through the https://www.braveclojure.com/basic-emacs/ chapter and am a little lost. I am thinking of trying Nightcode or Lightmod until the shock wears off and I can try Emacs again.

I’m dabbling in https://www.braveclojure.com and Living Clojure and enjoying this way of thinking that is really different from the world of procedural and OO programming.

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Don’t get discouraged, Clojure is very usable in vim.

vim-fireplace lets vim talk to a running clojure through nREPL.

From a brief glance Fireplace seems like all you need to follow along with that braveclojure page in vim instead.

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Thanks for the tip. I will give Fireplace a try!

Don’t want to start a flame war, but do check out Cursive. :slight_smile:

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Hi everyone!

I’m Daniel, a guy from a small European country called Latvia. I’ve been working as a full time PHP developer for about 6 years now.
I started writing my blog - thecodingbook.com - which included a PHP tutorial but while writing this tutorial I understood that PHP is something I want to change. I have learned a bunch of languages - python, c++, java, elixir, scala, kotlin etc. I have developed at least one small project in each of them.
But my story goes further. For a long time I want to develop some project to start a business but almost always I end up with a lack of development resources. And after reading a few resources that said that with Clojure you can develop a project with less developers than in other languages it actually sounded tempting. So I decided to give a shot to Clojure. I have determination to learn this language really deep and hopefully I will be lucky in the end with Clojure :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers, guys!

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