Leon, That sounds like hard-won experience, thank you for sharing it. I couldn't find a Paul DeGrandis talk with that name, would you happen to have a link? Is it "Clojure-Powered Startups" perhaps?
Thanks, Johanna On Saturday, July 18, 2015 at 6:47:44 AM UTC-7, Leon Grapenthin wrote: > > 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.
