Parallel Clojure Compilation with Bazel
37:28Optimizing Clojure: Leveraging Modern JVM for Performance
33:48Teaching Functional Programming with Clojure in Academia: Insights and Challenges
29:23The Infrastructure and Growth of Clojars
33:24Data Modeling Irregular Domains with Datomic: A Fabric Stash Case Study
34:11Jim Newton offers a candid assessment of teaching functional programming with Clojure at EPITA, analyzing student learning gaps and successes, and the impact of traditional curricula on outcomes.
What happens when you introduce Clojure and functional programming to students who aren’t looking for it? At EPITA (Paris), we teach a course on functional programming using Clojure, focused on immutability, recursion, and lazy evaluation. Most students don’t fully “get it” by the end. A few do—and that difference is striking. This talk is a candid look at that gap. Which ideas consistently fail to land? What clicks for the minority who connect with the model? How do constraints of a traditional curriculum shape the outcome? We’ll also share the exercises and infrastructure we use to run the course at scale, and what they reveal about learning (and not learning) Clojure. An honest account of teaching FP with Clojure: partial success, unexpected insights, and open questions.
