I have tried various different approaches from convincing of Clojure advantages in the Java devs concrete domain, showing off incredibly awesome toy projects, larger projects, not tryng to sell, trying to sell, sending ClojureTV videos and what not approach you can think of. I have not managed to introduce one Java dev to Clojure in a way that he picked it up and had no interest before. I have spent many hours thinking about how I could improve my "evangelizing" skills. And today I believe that what you can do is very little and your approach does not affect the outcome a lot. There is enough motivating and introductional content about Clojure on the web. If someone isn't motivated by all this and your initial impulse, he is simply not able to upgrade. It might be a lack of time, a lack of interest in programming altogether aka silent burnout, the fear of having to learn new things, the fear of forgetting old things, the fear of not wanting to leave a comfort zone, the fear of not being able to autocompleteprogram or the fact that someone is simply happy with clicking classes together and writing a new group by implementation every few days and being paid for it very well and many other reasons.
In many cases an existing comfort zone is an obstacle that you can't change. Almost nobody leaves his comfort zone only because you told him about something else outside of it, even if its gold and he believes you. OTOH people who leave their comfort zone on purpose every now and then do it because they are intrinsically motivated to do so. If they are out of ideas where to go, they will ask you for one and then "selling" Clojure is about as easy as mentioning between one and three interesting facts about it. They will be watching Rich Hickey talks in a minute. Unless a programmer is adventureous and likes to try out new languages or has decided that he "wants to learn something new", there is little you can do. In the other case there is little that you have to do. Personally I have simply decided not to waste time on trying to convince programmers to learn Clojure, instead I try to help those who are. OTOH spending time on improving evangelizing and elevator pitching is still well spent if you want to convince managers. I find Rich Hickeys rationale on the Clojure page is a great starting point and there is also a great talk by Paul deGrandis (Clojure minimizes risk). On Friday, July 10, 2015 at 12:20:23 AM UTC+2, Johanna Belanger wrote: > > Hi :) > > I've recently broached the subject of Clojure with another dev in my > organization, and his response was basically "What's Clojure"? and I'm not > sure how to answer that in a way that might inspire him. "It's a > dynamically-typed functional Lisp with persistent immutable data structures > that runs on the JVM" doesn't seem like it will grab his interest. =) > > I work primarily in .NET, and he does enterprise Java. I don't know him > well enough to know how happy he is with it. He did express interest in > learning .Net. > > I came to an appreciation of Clojure through > > -CQRS (the power of decomplection!) > -Sussman and Abelson's SICP class at MIT online (the power of > homoiconicity and functions!) > -the death of Silverlight (alternatives to Javascript in the browser?) > > By the time I found Rich Hickey's talks (eg Simple Made Easy) I was pretty > well primed to love Clojure. I've been using it for little personal > projects and prototyping for a couple of years, but I haven't put it in > production because no one else here knows it. > > Could anyone tell me how they got from enterprise Java to Clojure? > > Thanks very much, > Johanna > > -- 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 --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
