4Clojure with Me

I’m currently in the process of a renewed effort to become proficient with Clojure. We’ve been using it at World Singles in production for a couple of years now, but there’s been enough CFML that I’ve not really needed to do much in the Clojure beyond very superficial updates. But the CFML is shrinking, the Clojure is growing (well, not really… the Clojure code is much more concise than the CFML code, but you know what I mean), and it’s time for me to fully embrace Clojure.

It’s not that I haven’t tried over the past couple of years. But making the leap from self-taught ColdFusion developer to Clojure and functional programming has been no small task. Functional programming is such a different paradigm that I’ve stumbled over many of the basic concepts. Recently, however, I took a Coursera course on Programming Languages. That’s when the light bulbs started coming on. I had read Clojure books. I had gone to conferences. But sitting down and actually writing out code for the assignments, that’s when it started to click. To be clear, the Coursera course wasn’t Clojure-based. It wasn’t meant to teach any particular language. Rather, it was meant to teach programming concepts. And specifically, functional programming concepts. I started to understand the difference between recursion and iteration. The notion of variable assignments, and in particular, re-assigning a value to a variable, started to make me uneasy. Conceptually, the pieces were falling into place.

Now I’m tasked with fleshing out some code at work that relies on Clojure. Some of it is still CFML written in FW/1, but the meat of it is using the Clojure-based Expectations testing framework. It’s been a challenge, but as with the Coursera course, jumping into the code has proved to be very beneficial. But I still need to hone the Clojure skills in order to work efficiently. Enter 4Clojure.

Learning Clojure

Over the past few months, we’ve been making a pretty aggressive move towards using Clojure in our model at World Singles. We still have a CFML-based application in a ColdBox framework, but our model has seen a lot of CFML re-written as (fewer lines of) Clojure.

Before anybody asks, or leaps to conclusions, there will be no Helms-ian type blog posts where I bid adieu to the CFML community. Learning and using a new technology does not, and should not automatically equate to closing the door on any other. I’m not learning Clojure to replace CFML. I’m learning Clojure in addition to CFML. CFML will always be a tool in my toolbox. It just won’t be so lonely anymore.