As most Irreal readers know, Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) is looking for a new job. Part of his preparations is learning Clojure so of course he’s produced a video on using Clojure in Emacs with Clojure. It’s an elementary exposition but definitely worth watching.
The main point of the video is not Clojure itself but rather the use of Cider and the evaluation of expressions in the context of the code buffer. He shows how you can evaluate an expression from within the code buffer and how you can easily switch to the Clojure REPL to try things out.
It’s another example of exploratory programming that I’ve written about before. If you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to overstate the value of having the REPL always available to test out functions or even expressions. It makes programming much more efficient and fun.
The video is just short of 27 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time. Prot has promised more videos on Clojure, which I’m looking forward to. In the mean time, if you want to get a sense of what using Cider is like, take a look at his video. If you want another example, check out Mike Zamansky’s video on Day 1 and 2 of the 2022 Advent of Code challenge. He uses Clojure and demonstrates its use on nontrivial problems.