Thinking about learning Clojure
I don’t understand Clojure. After each brief attempt to learn it, I’ve quit in frustration because, honestly, I don’t get it at all. I can’t get my head around any of the Lisp-y variants, but add the requirement of navigating the JVM, words like homoiconic , and functional programming in general and I’m completely lost.
But, I remain fascinated by it. I can’t explain it, but when I read about Clojure, everything sounds right to me. It sounds like something that does things the way I’d want to do them if I were smart enough.
Also, I adore Rich Hickey. Watch any of his talks (such as this one), and you’ll see what I mean.
I haven’t written any real code in years, but would like to ease back into it. If I were smart, I’d dive head first into JavaScript/Node.js and be done with it. After all, that’s what everyone else is doing, right?
Except I want to do the opposite of what “everyone” is doing. Sometimes the reason everyone does something is that it’s a low common denominator. It’s usually also boring. Don’t ask me to explain it, but JavaScript bores me.
I want to learn something different. Something unique and fun and interesting. My other choices would be Go, Elixir, or Rust. Those all look fine, but I’ve become inexplicably attracted to Clojure so I’m starting there.
I’ve been here before, and what happens is that it gets hard and I quit trying. This post is just me putting something out there to remind me that I’m serious about it…this time.