Getting Clojure

Preface

I have been writing this book—at least in my head—for decades. As a professional programmer who has used everything from assembly language and FORTRAN to C and Python and Java and Ruby, I’ve spent much of my career longing to get my hands on a better programming language. In my mind’s eye I could see exactly what I wanted: I wanted a language that had the stripped-down syntax of Lisp. I wanted a language that embraced the power of functional programming. I wanted a language that was fast enough to run the real-world applications that I was writing. Most of all I wanted a language that had all the above and ran on the computing platforms I worked with. For years my imaginary programming language remained just that—imaginary. I spent a ...