Confession:The best way I have found to learn a language is to pick a girl and make something that impresses her.
When I was learning to use Node.js, I made a chat room for my girlfriend and I to talk in when we doing a long distance relationship. It had a sassy robot that pulled pictures of lolcats from reddit on command. Another weekend, I made a robot that would sext pickup lines if a girl messaged the right number. The simpler a project sounds, "a flirty robot that I can sext!", the more complicated the implementation will be. Although it was easy to do in node, I imagine that making a sexting robot service with clojure would make you learn a great deal about state if you tried to go from simple pick up lines to a robot that could conduct multiple conversations at once with several different people/numbers. It's what has worked for me and will probably be the technique I use for the foreseeable future. The idea is limited to topics that can be wrapped up into packages to impress women, but that is really just a exercise in imagination and creativity. Make friends with a math major and a whole field of abstract topics crop up that are fair game. Good luck! -Zack a.k.a American College Male P.S. I am extremely sorry if females feel left out by this advice. This is what has worked for me as a guy wishing to learn programming. I wish I had advice for you that would be more useful if you were trying to learn a language. If you generalized to make something you would want to show your friends, then it is probably still pretty applicable. >On Sep 17, 3:23 am, Thorsten Wilms <t...@freenet.de> wrote: > On 09/16/2011 11:50 PM, Dennis Haupt wrote: > > > i feel compelled to do something more complex in clojure. not too big, > > but bigger than what fits in 100 lines and offers some chances to use > > macros. > > it should also be fun, maybe something like robocode. > > Something that is not primitive but may stay small or at least has > clearly defined boundaries right from start ... if you rule out pure > logic puzzles, this does point to games, I think. > > There are so many simple games, some of which must have been implemented > a million times. You could try to do one of those, but with a twist, > perhaps. > > Like a Pacman, but where you steer the ghosts (only one at a time, > changing the direction it heads to). > > Dungeonmaster-Sokoban, where you have to push boxes to create a path > that will lead to the hero's death, once he arrives. That without > trapping your own worker. > > OR, you look for an existing project, where you could implement a > missing feature. Ideally one where you could interact with the > author/contributors via IRC.http://www.webnoir.org/might be a > candidate, where a comment system or tagging come to mind (I'm not > affiliated and don't know if something like that is underway, already). > > -- > Thorsten Wilms > > thorwil's design for free software:http://thorwil.wordpress.com/ -- 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
