(Re)Starting with Clojure

After attending JFokus last week I was inspired to alot of things. That's usually the way things go for me when I attend conferences.

One of the things I got really keen on doing was picking up Clojure again. I spent some time trying to pick up parts of the language about a year ago but not enough for it to really stick.

This time I went for the Eclipse plugin Counterclockwise. Eclipse is the IDE I currently use at work and I try to spend as much time in it as possible to get fluent. My heart tells me that I should use Emacs when programming LISP but Counterclockwise has worked out really well. It's quite minimal but functional. Just in line with LISP I guess.

After installing Counterclockwise and getting the REPLF running I started looking for test frameworks for Clojure. I'm a TDD fan and feel most at comfort when being able to write tests before writing the code to make them pass.

What I found (in addition to clojure-test which is what ships with the Clojure distribution) was Midje which seems to have some really nice features. I've just gotten it up and running, written my first tests and watching them both fail and succeed. I'll have to play around with it a bit more to get to know it better.

My plan now is to do a couple of katas to get my Clojure skills up to a level where I can actually produce a couple of lines code without having to Google each and every function and functionality.

I also bought The Joy of Clojure which was not available last time I spent time with Clojure. My expectations on the book are quite high as I've read some really positive comments on it.

Back to Clojure!