The long way through Software Craftsmanship

Brown Bag Session: Clojure's Data and Code

Sep 23, 2015 - 1 minute read - Comments - brown-bagtrainingclientclojurehomoiconicityprepared-katalispcode=datadata=codefeedback

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

Disclaimer about AI/GenAI

As of 2026-05-06, the text in these articles and blog entries has been written without AI/GenAI, except I sometimes use a spellchecker to fix errors. Think Word's spellchecker, not ChatGPT.

Notes, as of today (2026-05-06):

  • No code snippet has been automatically generated, nor vibe-coded, nor generated and reviewed.
  • I don’t have any article with AI contribution.

For future entries:

  • I may have used GenAI for the code in the repo. The code I exemplify/copy in the article will always be reviewed and tested, not vibe-coded. I will specify it in each snippet or at the top/bottom of the article.
  • I normally don't use it for the text contents, although if I have used it for the article text, it would be indicated as such.

Any entry before 2026-05-06 does not contain any AI/GenAI.

For more information, read the AI/GenAI Policy

Posted by Alvaro Garcia

Navigating the GitHub repositories Books read in 2015Q3