I’ve following the work Exercism has been doing for several years now. I used their product to learn a bit of Elixir and Go a few years back. I got an email from the today promoting a focus on functional programming languages in the month of June. I decided to learn a bit of Clojure, since I’ve been working with the JVM lately. I’ve done a few of the exercises and my takeaways so far are
- I don’t know how to format deeply nest parentheses. It feels like it looks bad no matter how I do it.
- I frequently forget to surround function calls in parentheses, particularly those that take no arguments.
- I keep inserting commas between arguments to functions since nearly every imperative uses this syntax.
- There is a fair amount of on-your-own research needed to complete the exercises. On one hand, I like that because I think it will help learnings stick with me. On the other hand, sometimes you can get stuck for a while (but this is the job, so can’t really complain).