Repository of related materials
- Expressiveness — when a language allows you to put more meaning with less code. It is not just about concision, but also precision, readability, flexibility and potential for abstraction.
- Everything is an expression. Most languages has both statements and expressions, which you can not really combine together, but in Lisp everything is an expression. A single uniform interface allows to compose everything naturally. Take for example Lego blocks: you can build whatever you want easily because those blocks are following the same rule of composition.
- An expression is either a single value or a list. There are single values like strings and numbers. But function calls and list data structure are all lists. So basically the whole point of writing a Lisp program is to combine together lists of lists and single values. This gives the same power of composition similar to expressions.
- Functional programming. Lisps are considered to be functional languages (there are also OOP capabilities). It means they are focused on avoiding data mutation and state. This allows developers to build truly reusable components and structure programs in a clean way. You can see that all new programming languages are mostly functional, so we can say that functional programming style has proved to be a good tool when building software.
The list above is inspired by an article “Why Racket? Why Lisp?”.
We are going to build a chat web application in ClojureScript using Rum library.
If you are not familiar with Lisps and Clojure, make sure to go through previous workshop exercises and watch a screencast:
Also take a look at Rum library to get the general idea of it.
It's nice to know the following...
- Clojure language or ClojureScript dialect
- Basic tooling (Leiningen & Figwheel)
- React.js library (learn)
- State management solutions like Flux (learn)
- Basics of functional programming (learn)
You have to be prepared for the workshop, so we don't have to waste time for this.
Make sure you have Java 1.6 or greater.
Install via Homebrew: brew install leiningen or other package managers.
Or using shell script:
- Download the lein script (or on Windows lein.bat)
- Place it on your
$PATHwhere your shell can find it (eg.~/bin) - Set it to be executable (
chmod a+x ~/bin/lein) - Run it (
lein) and it will download the self-install package
Or with Windows installer.
brew install rlwrap
or
- Clone the repo: https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap
- Execute
./configure
make
make install
Follow this manual. You don't have to install and configure everything, the important parts are: Parinfer plugin, language-clojure settings, lisp-paredit settings and Atom Settings sections.
- Community Resources
- ClojureScript REPL
- ClojureScript Synonyms
- ClojureScript Cheatsheet
- ClojureScript API
- ClojureDocs
- The Clojure Style Guide
- Quickref for Clojure Core
- ClojureScript Tutorial
- ClojureScript Koans
- Video course (RU)
- re-frame
- Clojure Jobs