Clojure Begins

After feeling more or less on top of the Server during the two weeks I worked on it, it made sense that the last day would be a stressful headache whilst I tried to get the last test to pass. It finally did, everything was green, I felt an enormous sense of relief. There were parts I was relatively happy with, and parts I would have like to work on further had I had the time. But on the whole, it worked, I don’t think it was a disaster and it was finished.

I had my IPM yesterday, got lots of really useful feedback and then said cheerio to Java. I now begin on Clojure.

Today I worked through the Clojure koans and have had a few thoughts:

  1. It’s really nice to be using vim again. I’d say my history with vim has been pretty standard. When I first started everything felt like a battle. Then vim and I became tentative friends. Then I started to realise all the cool things vim could do and tried to use them. That’s more or less where I still am. I use vim, but I don’t think I use it as well as I could. There are features I don’t use that often, like recording mode, that I would like to. There are some shortcuts I don’t know. I’m looking forward to using it with Clojure because I hope I’ll get better with it along the way. Plus I got the rainbow parantheses plugin and now it looks even better than before.

  2. I did not expect Clojure to feel so different. I guess I’ve only really used three languages before. I started with Ruby, then did a few weeks of Javascript, and then did Java. These weren’t so different and, as such, if you asked me to write a loop it wouldn’t take that long for me to figure it out. With Clojure, I’m still not entirely sure where to start. I’m going to start on the Roman Numerals kata tomorrow and I’m sure where to begin. This is fun, and challenging, and a little weird, but good.

So that’s pretty much where I am after my first day of Clojure. According to the koans I have achieved clojure enlightenment, so I’m sure Roman Numerals will be a breeze.