At the moment on the Clojure mailing list there is a large rambling discussion about Clojure needing to be easier for beginners. There is some merit to this idea but I find this type of discussion doesn’t actually produce anything worthwhile.  Despite the large amount of hot air a couple of people have stepped forward with some [...]

Nguyen (sorry wordpress stuffed up your name) offered up a simplified version of the cond macro. Behold:

(defmacro condd [pred & clauses]
`(letfn [(predd# [test-expr# expr#]
(->> test-expr# ~pred))]
[...]

I recently had a requirement for a version of cond that took a predicate expression and passed the clause as a parameter. While condp was close it didn’t really match what I was trying to do. Macros are still new to me so this was a good learning experience.
Here’s an example of the code I [...]

I picked this up from the mailing list. I didn’t want to forget about it so I’m posting it here as a reminder.

:x (comment
@echo off
java -cp d:/products/clojure/clojure.jar clojure.main "%~f0" %*
goto :eof
)

(println "Hi!" *command-line-args*)

Very handy.

I ran across an interesting blog post the other day from Jeff Gortatowsky. He has been trying to learn clojure and was having a hard time thinking in a functional manner. It resonated with me because I’ve also found that aspect of clojure to the the most difficult to learn. For the most [...]

Recently @Steve_Hayes twittered the following:
Why are functional trainwrecks good and oo ones bad? What’s the conceptual difference?
Since twitter is a little inadequate to answer this question directly I’ll attempt to outline my view of the difference on this blog. I’ll first put forward the disclaimer that I’m certainly not an expert in functional languages. [...]