I have a love/hate relationship with Clojure tooling.
I wanted to learn functional programming (FP) in a Lisp because:
1. There’s a thing I want to do and it felt like the right way to do it
N.B. ‘right’ is not always ‘easiest’
2. Lisp once beat me up quite badly. I’m bigger now. I wanted to go back and punch it on the nose
3. I won’t really ‘get’ immutability until I do some, with no option to cheat.
3. I find homoiconic functional programming conceptually elegant…
…then you try using the Clojure development environment and discover there isn’t one that everyone agrees on and the one used by expert requires you to learn a new language of keyboard hieroglyphs first.
I’ve done just enough Lisping to think that we are being as irresponsible teaching kids only object oriented programming as the BBC were in teaching them BASIC, but it would be actual child abuse to introduce them to FP via emacs and a language dependent on the underlying Object-Oriented Java Virtual Machine for it’s connection to libraries & reality.
This morning I realised I hadn’t plugged my Raspberry Pi in for ages. If you were a child who started coding with Scratch and a few drum loops on Sonic Pi then maybe a bit of the Squeak Smalltalk (Scratch is written in Squeak) or Python in a nice IDE, imagine being handed the ancient emacs scrolls and sent into a corner for a week to learn spells, before you could even start to learn to function. FP is going to initially make soup of your flabby imperative, ‘place is state’-damaged brain anyway. There is no need to make it harder. Teaching languages don’t have to train you for a job, only to think.
If we are going to raise functional children, we need a gentle slope up to Clojure. Clojure is probably the best practical language but it’s too hard. I’ve seen a few people suggest starting with Racket, which is a version of the Scheme Lisp dialect. This morning I poured DrRacket onto my Pi.
There was a minor hiccup with DrRacket not knowing what language I wanted it to read. Kids would need to be protected from that. I wanted “Determine language from source”, not to tell it I was a ‘beginning student’.
Because DrRacket is multi-lingual, the first line of the source code tells it what language to read:
#lang racket
You type in code then press the run button. This is not your grandfathers emacs REPL. Children should have no natural fear of their (parens). Ooh look, cats!
#lang racket
(define (extract str)
(substring str 4 8))
(extract “the cats out of the bag”)
;;-> “cats”
On The Outside 