Clojure 101

A brief introduction to the Clojure programming language: combining the best features from 40 years of Lisp heritage with the familiarity, performance, and ubiquity of Java and the Java virtual machine.

Maybe you've heard the buzz around Clojure. It's Lisp for the JVM (what does that even mean?). It has immutable data structures (why would you want that?) It has agents and software transactional memory (what does that buy me?). At first glance, it's just a jumble of new concepts and confusing choices wrapped in a vastly unfamiliar syntax. Despite that a lot of heavy hitters are embracing this little language that's breaking all the rules, leaving Java and Ruby behind and never looking back. This talk is an introduction to the language, focusing on the syntax (quite minimal, that's half the point), the basic data structures and core functions, the concurrency support, and the interoperability with Java. You'll get a feel for why people quickly learn to love this language, embracing 40 years of elegance from the Lisp side, combined with the ubiquity and performance of the Java virtual machine.

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his son, Jacob.

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