EuroClojure 2012 was almost a month ago. Now that my thoughts have settled I've made an attempt to distill what the event meant to me.
First of all, I was impressed at the intellectual engagement of the speakers and attendees. This is a grown-up community. Talks were less about "How do I do X in Clojure" and more about using the language to move the industry forward.
If you're a developer who's interested in the avant-garde, you should be paying attention to what this community is coming up with. I left feeling that Clojure is less a programming language and more a delivery mechanism for the Clojure philosophy.
But what is the Clojure philosophy?
Whether it was Rich Hickey railing against in-place database updates, Nick Rothwell animating art, Max Weber explaining CQRS or Paul Ingles exploring event-sourced analytics, an underlying theme was that time deserves first-class representation in interesting systems.
Even more directly, Bruce Durling's Incanter incantations and Jeff Rose and Sam Aaron's waveform wizardry manipulated time-series data before our eyes to great effect.
In an age where we can no longer assume that the universe marches to the beat of a single CPU, implicit time-management is no longer a convenience but a crippling limitation.
So when someone asks me "Should I adopt Clojure yet? What is the killer application?" I will answer them:
It's time.
First of all, I was impressed at the intellectual engagement of the speakers and attendees. This is a grown-up community. Talks were less about "How do I do X in Clojure" and more about using the language to move the industry forward.
If you're a developer who's interested in the avant-garde, you should be paying attention to what this community is coming up with. I left feeling that Clojure is less a programming language and more a delivery mechanism for the Clojure philosophy.
But what is the Clojure philosophy?
Whether it was Rich Hickey railing against in-place database updates, Nick Rothwell animating art, Max Weber explaining CQRS or Paul Ingles exploring event-sourced analytics, an underlying theme was that time deserves first-class representation in interesting systems.
Even more directly, Bruce Durling's Incanter incantations and Jeff Rose and Sam Aaron's waveform wizardry manipulated time-series data before our eyes to great effect.
In an age where we can no longer assume that the universe marches to the beat of a single CPU, implicit time-management is no longer a convenience but a crippling limitation.
So when someone asks me "Should I adopt Clojure yet? What is the killer application?" I will answer them:
It's time.
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