(Part 2) Top products from r/Clojure

The most amazing demo I've seen at a meetup was done with Overtone. Whether or not to pursue Clojure or Python is a matter of taste/inclination. I think it would be really hard a priori to determine it since it requires a fair amount of exposure to decide whether or not you are interested in computing as an intellectual exercise.

If you think you'll end up writing code a fair amount, then this is like any trade: invest in good tools to get professional results. In my opinion, Clojure is the superior tool (compared with Python).

Both Python and Clojure claim Lisp as an antecedent but Clojure has these "killer features":

• macros: the ability to add new features to the language. One way to program in Lisp is to design a Domain Specific Language so you can interact with your problem using its language, not some arbitrary computer language.
  
• literal syntax: think of this as a way to describe sets and other data structures that are core to programming. Here Python is great but Clojure is better!
  
• very thoughtful design of its data structures so that you can move up and down a ladder of abstraction to pick, say, the right type of collection for your problem (e.g. a list vs. a vector)
  
• functional programming is encouraged and supported with immutable data types. Not having immutable data types makes life really hard because one has to deal with values that change over time. If your domain is music, where time is of the essence (pardon the pun), I would think that immutability would be important to you.
  
• Clojure runs on the browser (ClojureScript). This means that you can write all your code in one language (if you end up doing a lot of it, then this matters).
  
  Python is really nice but after having worked with it for years, I felt that I could do better. Things that pushed me away:
  
  
• Writing DSLs is not the default. Sure, one can use parsers and create a grammar, but this is more like building a programming language instead of a DSL. (Sure, there is method overloading which one can take pretty far...)
  
• Immutability: for my domain (processing data with a time dimension) it was very painful to keep track of values since the only efficient data structures were mutable. The core issue that I had debugging was that I had a hard time tracking when the data changed. Having immutable values provides a dead-simple solution to the problem of history.
  
  I wholeheartedly recommend reading SICP to anyone who ends up writing code in Lisp because it is a great way to expand one's mental model of what's possible in terms of capturing abstraction in code. And I think Scheme is a really nice language to learn. If you are interested, you might want to look at The Little Schemer. I have found Chez Scheme (now free) to be excellent.
  
  Good luck--feel free to write if you have any questions.
  
  Cheers! afm

I love the book Head First Java http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Java-Kathy-Sierra/dp/0596009208

That may be too thorough for you though. It's a great book.

> I've never taken any CS classes and so I am lacking in my understanding of the O(n*long(n)) stuff. Do you have any good resources so I can do a little research?

The definitive guide or big-O and algorithms is referred to by us CS types as "CLR", though looking up "Big-O Notation" on wikipedia will give you a quick intro. What O(n log n) means is that you calculation is working on every item in the list (n items) on the order of log n times. The smaller the function in the big-O, the more efficient it operates as you increase the input size, such as the length of the list.

most of the algorithms books are for any programming language as long as they are imperative.

as far as functional languages go, there are:

• Purely Functional Data Structures
  
• Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design
  
  even though neither are using clojure.
  
  If you are interested in academic papers, you can find good references here:
  http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1539/whats-new-in-purely-functional-data-structures-since-okasaki