Hi, I've been watching the Neal Ford video from Clojure/conj about World Domination and thought about the propaganda part. Clojure was sold to me as a practical Lisp on the JVM. This was good because I had already decided to cure my parenthesophobia and the contenders were Racket, Guile and Clojure. However, I think it is also very important to reach people who do not actively look for a language like Clojure (i.e. a Lisp) because most people do not imagine what they miss with their current language of choice.
As a result, I wanted to participate in very short rounds of presentations where people get to hear about various 'exotic' (as in, not java) languages. People with no prior interest into Clojure are unlikely to attend to anything longer than a "lightning talk". IMO, for this target, the biggest (only) barrier to entry is being a LISP and I thought maybe it could (should?) not be put in the forefront, but only after enticing would-be Clojure programmers with all the other goodies. Catching them off guard with a casual "Oh, btw it's a LISP" : I'd call it "sucker punch propaganda" ☺. Of course, it would also be very important to : - sympathize with the first replusion wrt lack of syntactic clues, lack of infix math operators and of emphasis on the function called. - explain how the language & ide reduce the pain - hint at the reason for this choice (i.e. power of macros) Then we could challenge the audience not to give up on all the goodies just because of an initial repulsion toward the syntax. In hindsight, it just seem usual salesman strategy : show the obviously good parts before introducing the pain points. While I won't be showing this presentation, I'd be very interested to hear any comment wrt to this strategy in general, and my current implementation outline at https://github.com/scientific-coder/clj-pres/tree/master/sucker-punch-propaganda Best Regards, B. [1] https://blip.tv/clojure/neal-ford-neal-s-master-plan-for-clojure-enterprise-mindshare-domination-5953926 -- 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
