Clojure Programming

Chapter 19. Introducing Clojure into Your Workplace

(or, Sneaking Clojure Past the Boss^[430])

It is a sad fact that many programmers, if not the majority, use languages and tools every day that they begrudge. Either through historical accident, organizational inertia, or hard facts of the business, we often find ourselves stuck wishing we were using something, anything else to get our jobs done.

This status quo may be particularly frustrating if you’ve come far enough in your understanding and appreciation of Clojure that you’d like to be able to use it in your day job or on your next consulting engagement. What we’d like to do here is provide you with a brief guide, a cheat sheet, a set of talking points and strategies to help you successfully introduce Clojure into your workplace. In doing so, you’ll hopefully end up having more productive days, less frustrating nights, and a more profitable business.

Just the Facts…

Clojure is new and innovative. In its relatively short history, Clojure has turned a lot of conventional programming language wisdom on its ear. It was unthinkable five years ago that a language would gain popularity that encourages functional programming, uses persistent immutable data structures by default, provides tractable concurrency and parallelism primitives, offers extensive metaprogramming facilities, and runs on the JVM with little to no performance differential compared to Java.

There’s a lot more to that story, and there’s no reason to believe that Clojure ...