Clojure: Towards the Essence of Programming

What is the essence of programming? How close do popular languages such as Java bring you towards that essence? In this session, we'll discuss Clojure, a language for the Java Virtual Machine that builds on a 40+ year history of Lisp: the programming language that's also a programming language toolkit.

Clojure combines the best features of Lisp with the breadth and power of the Java Virtual Machine and the Java infrastructure; it allows you to build expressive, beautiful code … without sacrificing any of Java's processing power. Once you embrace Clojure's odd (to our eyes) syntax, you'll find that its interoperability with Java, its pragmatic approach to functional programming, and its advanced concurrency capabilities are all easily approachable. Clojure turns traditional object-oriented programming on its head: separating data from the functions that operate on that data, with the end result being more concise, more performant, more testable, more readable code: code that gets to the essence of programming.

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

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