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Clojure-powered Startups

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Summary

Paul deGrandis examines three startups and their technology needs, risk and tradeoffs, presenting how Clojure did its part in their success.

Bio

Paul deGrandis lives for magnificent engineering. Elegant, well-founded, useful solutions to problems that say something about engineering's beauty. He loves metrics, taking on the impossible, and making lives better through technology. Previously Paul worked at PushButton Labs, Etsy.com, OurShelf, and SilverCloud Software as well as working in advanced research (DARPA).

About the conference

Clojure/West is a new conference bringing the Clojure community together to discuss techniques, tools, and the state of the Clojure ecosystem March 16-17th for three tracks of sessions. Prior to the conference, register for three days of training by the Clojure experts.

Recorded at:

Jun 22, 2012

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Community comments

  • I love Lisp and Clojure is totally cool

    by peter lin,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    As much as I would love to see developers move to LISP and S-expression languages, I just don't see it happening. I've tried teaching people LISP over the years and it is very tough. Developers either get LISP or they don't. The biggest challenge though is S-expression. It feels great to me, but I've seen many people struggle horribly. LISP has been around for 30 years, but it still hasn't reached the level of C++ or Java in terms of market share.

  • Weak on data

    by Don Noit,

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    The talk was tall on claims but very weak on data to backup those claims. Was hoping that he would describe situations from the startups he mentioned specifically indicating what was difficult to solve using languages other than Clojure, but got solved elegantly using Clojure.

    I take away the feeling that he is a fan of Clojure rather than a person who could demonstrate data to backup his fan-feeling. This is not a knock on the presenter, not on Clojure.

  • Re: I love Lisp and Clojure is totally cool

    by Paul deGrandis,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I think with the increasing exposure to Python/Ruby and JavaScript, Clojure (and LISPs in general) aren't that big of a leap. Clojure's choice to include some syntax (data literals for vectors, maps, etc) helps *a lot.*

    I haven't had any problem bringing engineers up to speed on Clojure and ClojureScript. It's usually a week or so of dedicated ramping up before they're committing quality changes to a codebase and reasoning about architectures/data with the language as a tool.

  • Re: Weak on data

    by Paul deGrandis,

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    The talk was indeed light on the data. Originally the talk was an hour long but was shortened because of conference scheduling. The data points and case studies got cut, sadly. I felt that others in the Clojure community had captured those case studies pretty well and I decided to focus more on the "secret sauce" of how I've successfully made Clojure work for me in different capacities.

    During the Q/A following the presentation, we got into more specific data points, but again not as much as I wanted.

    I'd be more than happy to share any stories or data points that you (or anyone else) might be interested in. I have project metrics for almost all projects I've taken on from 2006-now.
    Is there a specific dimension of data you were interested in hearing about?

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