Navigating Clojure: A Fresh Look From a Data Analysis Background
In this presentation I’ll talk about my experience learning about Clojure and its ecosystem, community, ideas and tools. I’ll give some perspective on the topics of ease and simplicity from the eyes of a newcomer and I’ll discuss a musical metaphor to look at Clojure. I’m a 21 year old data analyst, I currently do freelance work and I’m in my final year of university studying finance. I am a self-taught programmer, my experience with Java is limited to a few online courses. What drew me into Clojure was it being a Lisp that I can use for the web with ClojureScript but what kept me was an appreciation for the mature ecosystem and focus on simplicity. I think Clojure can benefit from introducing easiness for newcomers, the form of which can be templates such as Luminus but for other disciplines such as data analysis and dashboards. I intend to answer the following questions in my talk: - What does the build system look like to a newcomer? - What does the ecosystem look like to a newcomer? - What meta concepts should we encourage? I will demonstrate some open-source habits and principles of the Clojure community which could surprise a newcomer, and are worth learning. I will offer my perspective, as a newcomer, about aspects that could possibly open Clojure for more users, and about current projects, which could be a reason for non-lispers to learn the joys of working with Lisp and Clojure. Finally, to reason about Clojure’s usability and ease, I will follow up on Rich Hickey’s musical instrument metaphor and propose we could rather view Clojure as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). I'll briefly discuss what a DAW is and how it can be a more fitting metaphor for a programming language such as Clojure and how ease can be implemented with minimal complexity through concepts similar to "Samples" in DAWs.