I’ve been trying to pick up Clojure. My key motivating factor is the hope of one day being able to appreciate the gravity of the LISP family of languages, unveil the power behind S-expressions, dabble with the somewhat black art of concurrency and functional programming.
Thus far, it’s taken me the earlier half of 3 books on Clojure to get to this point where I’m relatively comfortable with the syntax and some of the idioms of the language. But because of its terseness, Clojure doesn’t afford a newbie very much “typing time” to digest and soak in the language. In Clojure, you start your first paren, and before you know it, you’ve executed the code in the REPL successfully – no mistakes to learn from, no cryptic error messages to keep in mind.
I’ve recently picked up a book called Programming Intelligence. It’s a book about data mining, machine learning and other meaty AI stuff with all its code samples in Python.
So what I’ve been doing as my latest stage in Clojure learning, is going through the book, digesting the Python code samples, and reimplementing them in Clojure.
Here’s an example of a snippet in Python:
And my version in Clojure:
I’ve only done about 3 snippets so far, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot because I haven’t simply copied code out of a book (which hasn’t really worked for reasons stated above), nor have I had to “come up” with things to implement. By reimplementing code from another language in Clojure, I get to practice the syntax while copying the algorithms.