Clojurians Log v2

Hi @nate and @neumann! I just wanted to give you a bit of feedback about the podcast. I’ve been learning Clojure for the past half year now, and it’s been great. I’m listening to every Clojure-related podcast I can find, and recently I added yours as well. I’m working my way through it from the start. Yesterday evening I hosted a Clojure coding dojo, intended mostly for people without any Clojure or even FP experience. When we planned this coding dojo, I happened to be listening to the first few Tic Tac Toe episodes, and I decided to use that as inspiration. It was great! I converted your solution into a script that I worked my way through in a classroom-style setting, showing things and giving small exercises. (See: https://github.com/svdo/coding-dojo-clojure) Everybody loved it! Especially the way how you built it up to having a single reduce with something that lazily reads a collection from stdin was very insightful and an awesome way of showing the power of FP. So here you go: THANK YOU!!! Thank you for the inspiration you gave me and for helping me host a very successful coding dojo!

Wow, this is awesome!

How many people attended? Was it hard to get them to the point they were executing the exercise code?

and thanks for sharing the code you used

There were about 45 participants. I used Nightcode so we could get started very quickly. I opened the evening by having everybody type a little bit in Nightcode to experience the parinfer smart mode: don’t worry about parens, focus on indentation. And then we started. So I had everybody follow along while I worked on the projector, and gave them lots of little exercises (see github repo, it’s in the comments in game.clj). I think we used some 2.5 – 3 hours to work through the whole thing. But ending in the grand finale of that reduce with lazy sequence of things from stdin really brought the FP message home.

(a few of the participants, less than 10, chose to work on their own instead of doing the more “guided track”)

wow, that's a great turnout for a workshop

does Nightcode have a built-in clojure environment or was that running externally in lein or something?

It comes bundled with everything it needs: Clojure, Leiningen, boot, all in one jar. Just double click and go!

If you’re into doing Clojure with people who are new to it, Nightcode is hard to beat. Have a look at it if you’re interested at https://github.com/oakes/Nightcode

Great to know. Thanks for the info. We're always on the lookout for ways to make getting into clojure easier.