While I agree his wording wasn't really the best, I think it can also be interpreted differently depending on what kind of n00b he is talking about. I definitely would see a lot of the mid-late sections of stuarts book be way over my head when I started learning programming. Kinda like when I was learning about pointers in C back in middle school. It took a long time for that stuff to gel. Macro writing is not an easy subject a n00b can just dive into with little programming background. Just learning about variables and abstractions can be such a mind blower, you gotta start with basics first before moving up. The book is simply targeted to a different audience and makes certain assumptions about its readers. I believe clojure can be used to teach even the programmer n00bs but there just hasn't been development in that direction. Basically it would take a book or course on basic programming principles that just happened to use clojure as the language. Such a course or class wouldn't teach about advanced clojure topics and thus wouldn't have an advantage of using clojure as the teaching language and could use a different language like python instead, which many books already have done. Given that the main focus of clojure is to attack the harder problems like concurrency, which are not trivial topics, it can be viewed as over the head of n00bs coming from little background.
Best, Brent On Jun 29, 12:14 am, Michael Richter <ttmrich...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 29 June 2010 02:26, cageface <milese...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Stuart's book is a big help here but I'm afraid that Clojure is simply over > > the heads of a lot of "noobs" anyway. > > Ah. The Clojure community has already started down the road to Common > Lisp-style, smugness-generated obscurity and disdain. Bravo! Well-played! > > Just a little suggestion: instead of thinking of Clojure users as elites who > are "over the heads" of "n00bs", perhaps you can figure out a way to get the > "n00bs" to join the self-proclaimed elite. I mean really, if the elites are > even *half* as intelligent as they claim to be, surely they can tackle this > human relations problem with the same zeal and formidable intellect that > they apply to software-related problems. Or is this too difficult? > > -- > "Perhaps people don't believe this, but throughout all of the discussions of > entering China our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese people. > It's not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot." > --Sergey Brin, demonstrating the emptiness of the "don't be evil" mantra. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
