Today, at a client, I’ve facilitated the brown-bag session on Clojure, introducing Lisp’s homoiconicity.

Session Structure

The session was designed as a kata, first introducing participants in the problem, letting some time to read the initial version and to think about possible solutions.

Then, I structured the rest of the time as a prepared kata, where I was explaining in the beamer our current problems (day-to-day tasks) and possible solutions in Clojure.

Among them:

• Configuration and extensibility: allowing for flexibility, define at configuration time new features without recompiling or modifying the system.
• Persisting and restoring certain state: this is a problem that could easily be solved persisting data in Lisp

I explained, in private to those who asked, about Lisp and its dialects Common Lisp, Clojure and Scheme.

Feedback

• They liked the effort of investigating new languages to solve problems we have in our current stack
• They liked introducing the language features with a back-story to better understand the concepts
• They suggested to improve the level of the session: as the group as a whole is still starting with Clojure, leaving them on their own with code is too much. They asked for more guidance