On 17/03/10 04:54 PM, David Nolen wrote:
To me the beauty of Clojure isn't that you _don't_ need a strong
academic background or even much exposure to FP to approach the
language. Clojure is relatively free of FP jargon, instead we have
"Rich Hickey Jargon". I jest :)
Very good. And so far, my experience has borne this out. It is
approachable, elegant, immediately usable. It's just that I am curious,
so I would like to be able to have at least a basic idea of what these
other conversations are about, even if I can't entirely follow every
argument.
But seriously, in my personal opinion Monads are relatively useless in
the context of Clojure. They are necessary in pure FP languages like
Haskell because otherwise it's impossible get any real applications
written. This is not to say they are not useful, you just don't need
to know a damn thing about them to have fun in Clojure.
OK. That puts it a bit more in perspective. Also, once I was online
again, I reached for Wikipedia to see if I could find an article written
to be understood by those outside the field. Actually, the first two
paragraphs here were helpful to get at least a basic grasp of what
Monads are about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)
The overview here is certainly more readable than the foldoc entry I
read, and it, in turn links to a page on monad as used in category
theory which is, I am sure, readable by mathematicians, but which again
left me scratching my head just as the foldoc entry had. So I guess
it's not so much FP that I find hard to grok as it is the math from
which it has borrowed some terminology.
Having hacked on Clojure for a a year and half now I think the best
approach is to learn those aspects of Clojure that are most useful to
you. You certainly don't need to pick up everything at once. I still
don't completely grok deftype/protocols or the more involved
concurrency constructs. This hasn't stopped me from writing many
useful programs.
Most useful to me, or at least most interesting ... I can't say that at
this point I can see where I'm going to use this. But it certainly *is*
intriguing ... including the bits that right now are a hard to follow at
least in part due to the unfamiliar terms.
If you _do_ want to get deeper in Clojure's philosophy you can't beat
Rich Hickey's Amazon Bookshelf.
I'm not sure at this point how deep I want to go. Nice resource, though.
Ben
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