

Reasons to Learn Clojure - lpolovets
http://www.quora.com/Clojure/Why-would-someone-learn-Clojure/answer/Leo-Polovets

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lpolovets
Someone on Quora asked about the advantages of learning Clojure. I'm a Clojure
newbie, but my team at work uses Clojure heavily so I polled them for their
thoughts and summarized the results. Please let me know if you have any
questions about Clojure or our experience with it, and I'll try to answer them
(or ask someone who I work with to answer them).

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jefe78
Interesting article. I've been toying with the idea of learning a LISP lately
and you sold me. What is a good route to explore this? I.e., what should I
install(I run Linux/OSX and Windows) and what are some real world
applications? Also, do you recommend any books or online resources?

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lpolovets
Installing Clojure is pretty easy (<http://clojure.org/getting_started>) and
you can get far with the REPL. After you've played around a bit, you will
probably starting using lein (like maven/ant, but for Clojure), which handles
REPL startup, dependency management, JAR building, etc.

For IDEs, I really like IntelliJ + the La Clojure plugin. Many of my coworkers
us Emacs + Swank/SLIME. I'm not an emacs user and don't know much about that
setup, but it's a very popular setup.

A book that I liked a lot is Clojure in Action
([http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Action-Amit-
Rathore/dp/1935182...](http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Action-Amit-
Rathore/dp/1935182595)). I've also heard that The Joy of Clojure is excellent,
but it's more appropriate after you're already comfortable with Clojure.

As for online resources, I've found <https://github.com/functional-
koans/clojure-koans> to be very useful. You can clone the project, which
consists of a lot of "fill-in-the-blank" unit tests. The tests are designed to
teach you the common functions and data structures available in Clojure.

~~~
jefe78
Thanks for the awesome answer. My girlfriend and my weekend are not pleased
with you but I'm pretty excited to explore this. Thanks again!

