If you enjoyed yesterday’s post on Mike Zamansky’s use of Clojure and Cider to solve an Advent of Code problem, he has a couple more offerings that you’ll probably like too. Like his last video, these two consider a current Advent of Code problem and apply Clojure and Cider to their solution.
If you don’t like Clojure, the first post above also considers the Python solution in the text but not the video. I don’t know any Clojure but it’s a Lisp and familiar enough that I had no problem following along. Even if you’re a complete Lisp n00b, Zamansky’s last 3 videos do a good job introducing some of the syntax and concepts.
As with yesterday’s post, these two approach the problems in an interactive or exploratory way. You can watch Zamansky build up the solution piece by piece and even do a bit of debugging when he gets stuck at one point.
I’ve always found the fact that Clojure is hosted on the JVM off-putting because of security and resource hog concerns. Still, I really enjoyed Zamansky’s videos and felt, despite my misgivings, an urge to try it out. Perhaps I will. Clojure is a far better way of dealing with the Java environment than Java itself.