On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Ben Armstrong <synerg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I would like to have is some sort of lexicon to at least help explain > the terminology in a way that doesn't require three years of academic > exposure to functional programming to read. Is there such a reference? Or > should I just ignore threads like "Why do functions in the state monad only > accept one value?" and be happy that at least somebody cares about this > stuff, so that I don't have to? > > Ben > To me the beauty of Clojure isn't that you _don't_ need a strong academic background or even much exposure to FP to approach the language. Clojure is relatively free of FP jargon, instead we have "Rich Hickey Jargon". I jest :) But seriously, in my personal opinion Monads are relatively useless in the context of Clojure. They are necessary in pure FP languages like Haskell because otherwise it's impossible get any real applications written. This is not to say they are not useful, you just don't need to know a damn thing about them to have fun in Clojure. Having hacked on Clojure for a a year and half now I think the best approach is to learn those aspects of Clojure that are most useful to you. You certainly don't need to pick up everything at once. I still don't completely grok deftype/protocols or the more involved concurrency constructs. This hasn't stopped me from writing many useful programs. If you _do_ want to get deeper in Clojure's philosophy you can't beat Rich Hickey's Amazon Bookshelf. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
