Clojure: The Beginning

So I guess I’ve started learning this language. I’ll try to write some stuff in here every day that I poke at it some more, which will hopefully be every day.

I’ve installed leiningen on the mac (really just downloaded it from http://leiningen.org/, or more accurately, their github repo). So far seems pretty neat. I didn’t have to download clojure at all with this thing.

Basically, you grab the script and mark it executable. Then you run it and it installs itself.

After that, you can create a new skeleton with lein new <projectName> and you get a bunch of clojure to start with.

I really like the clojure plugin for IntelliJ, and I also like LightTable.

LightTable is good for figuring out small chunks of code. It’s a really good learning tool.

IntelliJ has the rest of the stuff I’m used to from writing in Java (and PHP since PhpStorm is really good and similar). It has my terminal for git and my folder/file structures and stuff. It is familiar; which is good.

I can also deploy clojure to heroku, which is neat since it fulfills some of my goals of working with salesforce (potentially)

On to the language:

On the surface it doesn’t seem too difficult actually. After looking at it for a while (I bought books) I’m starting to see how it works. For simple things at least.

(+ 2 3) returns 5. You have your function (+) and the two parameters passed into it (2 & 3). Everything seems to be list based. The hard part is going to be learning the keywords I think. I’m going to keep some kind of appendix document to track keywords and oddities and such. I’ll define as best I can.