As I sit next to a gas store in Vermont, I once again have a hard copy book with me to read on vacation. This time it’s “Learning ClojureScript” by Andrew Meredith, and just like Clojure For the Brave and True it’s another free book that can easily be downloaded and read from any fancy gizmos. Unlike my trip to Italy, I have no fear of misplacing or having a piece of technology stolen because we are staying in one place for this trip.

As I continue my journey with learning functional programming, I have started to explore deeper into the languages that I enjoy and do some experimenting with interesting parts of those languages. This has led me to defmulti and defmethod, enabling you to create methods that deal with different implementations that are selected by a dispatch function. This is certainly easier to see in code, but it allows you to create a function based on the return of the dispatch function that will send the parameters to another function.

Clojure seems to be coming up a lot in postings, books, and social media. Some most notable mentions are by Gene Kim in a couple of different instances, Love Letter To Clojure being the biggest but also in his book The Unicorn Project where Clojure is a beloved language by Maxine the main protagonist hero of the story. Another well-known name that has talked about Clojure on his blog is Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob) with his posting Why Clojure?

This time of year, I always find it interesting the number of articles telling you the top languages you should learn. Yes, there’s a steady stream of these types of articles throughout the year but right at the end when a new year is about to start is when I’ve seen them the most. Titles typically include something along the lines of “Top Five languages to learn in 2020”, “Languages to improve your developer life”, “Programming Languages that you need to know in 2020”.

In my last post, I said I was in Italy on vacation and you may be thinking to yourself (most likely not, but just go with it) “what high tech gizmos did he bring with him on his travels?” and I would happily reply “A book!”, yes a paper book. Being a software developer, I have access to tons of technology, more so when it comes to paper book replacements but there is just something about a real book that makes reading and learning for me better than using a computer, tablet, or doohickey.

Made this posting sometime ago but I’ve been forgetting to actually post it. When I was looking up some information on Scala I found a great video tutorial on youtube made by MadocDoyu, which can be found here. In part of the video he introduces the Project Euler, this project seems really interesting. I plan on solving problems time to time using many of the languages I have looked at. I’m hoping this will keep my skills in these languages up to date.