Foreword

The authors of this book have taken an ambitious and aggressive approach to teaching Clojure. You know how everyone loves to say they teach using the “drinking from a fire hydrant” method? Well, at times it feels like these guys are trying to shove that fire hydrant right up... let’s just say it’s a place where you don’t normally put a fire hydrant. This isn’t intended as a first book on programming, and it may not be an ideal first book on Clojure either. The authors assume you’re fearless and, importantly, equipped with a search engine. You’ll want to have Google handy as you go through the examples. The authors blaze through many of the classics of both functional programming and industry programming in a whirlwind tour of Clojure that feels at times more like a class-five tropical storm. You’ll learn fast!

Our industry, the global programming community, is fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass haute couture designers from New York to Paris. We’re slaves to fashion. Fashion dictates the programming languages people study in school, the languages employers hire for, the languages that get to be in books on shelves. A naive outsider might wonder if the quality of a language matters a little, just a teeny bit at least, but in the real world fashion trumps all.