Ep 091: Combo Boost

Functional Design in Clojure

Each week, we discuss a different topic about Clojure and functional programming.

If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, tweet @clojuredesign, send an email to [email protected], or join the #clojuredesign-podcast channel on the Clojurians Slack.

This week, the topic is: "effective expressiveness." We compose our thoughts on why Clojure expressiveness is so effective but can be so hard to learn.

Our discussion includes:

• Why Clojure can give you a boost as a developer—in the short and long term.
• Our definition of expressiveness, and why it's not simply about conciseness.
• Why object-oriented developers often struggle to learn functional programming.
• What makes some abstractions better than others.
• The deep implications of immutability.
• How to work your way up to an expert functional programmer.

Selected quotes:

• "Getting rid of problems over time really adds up."
• "More of the code is solving the problem instead of being boilerplate."
• "You hold things at a higher level, but still very clearly, because they're well defined."
• "Because all of the verbs in Clojure work on all the data structures, they become more powerful."
• All of these new pieces have names and concepts associated with them, and you're not going to know them."
• "You can do tiny things, but tiny things are toys. You want big things. You want to solve problems."
• "It's not a small adaptation of thinking in a little region of the code, but it affects how you structure and organize everything."
• "You have to go in levels. You can't go all the way from zero to done."

Links:

• Clojure Core