Clojure Dojo

I’ve just got back from Clojure Dojo over at the Thoughtworks offices in Soho. The Clojure Dojos have been run by the London Clojurians for about five years now and are still going strong. I’ve been meaning to go to one for a while, and tonight the stars were right.

What’s a Clojure Dojo? Developers gather in a room full of pizza¹ with computers and chat about which editors they use.² Then someone very sensibly says we should probably start.

First we introduce ourselves, tell everyone how much we know about Clojure and what the first language we learned was.³ There were a good mix of people in tonight, a few who had been doing Clojure for years, many for months, and a few like me who have been dabbling their toes in the water for a while. I was heartened to see a Maker there who had graduated on Friday - that takes some guts and enthusiasm.

Then we pitch ideas to hack on for the evening. They were all great ideas, from Conway’s Game of Life to Google Maps plugins that show extinct species. The winner was a Twitter Markov Generator - an awesome idea that generates new tweets based upon a history of tweets, picking the next word based upon the likely hood that it follows from the previous word in the history.

We were split into random groups of 3-4 and - just got on with it. After about two hours the teams gathered together once more to show off their (completely unfinished) products. Then we all went home.

The subject sounded fairly dry to me, but it turned out to be plenty to get my teeth stuck in to - I’d almost recommend it as a kata. I was working with three other devs - Fabio, who’d been working on Clojure for about a year and had the most wicked Emacs/Cider⁴ set up that was a joy to watch him code with. There was also Francis who had been looking at Clojure ‘for about two weeks’, but had a Lisp background that just shone through. And happily we also had Chris, the convener of the Dojo who had been working in Clojure for four years or so. He helped a lot, and was great to chat with about practices, concepts and the style of Clojure.

I learned a lot in a short space of time, refreshing my brief exposure to the language quite quickly.⁵ But the best bit was when we planned the data structure. Initially we were looking at nested hash-map arrangement, with the inner map indicating the percentage chance of each next word - something like:

{ "Word" { "nextWord1" 1, "nextWord2" 10, "nextWord3" 79} }

But then Francis suggested that we just hold a list of a hundred words that represented the probability distribution:

{ "Word" ["nextWord1"
          "nextWord2" ;; ten times
          "nextWord3"] ;; eighty odd times
}

To which I responded that we may as well just collect up all of the next words and randomly sample from it. I thought this would make everyone go ‘oh, but that’d be too long’ but, no, everyone liked it. So massive, massive vectors it was.

My next favourite moment was when I wondered whether we’d be slowly feeding the tweets in one by one to a function to build the hash-map. No, Fabio (I think) said - we’ll just combine them into one giant string and feed it in.

One. Giant string. Of all the tweets. Mind blown. Not quite big data, but I loved the epic processing powers it felt like we were harnessing - lightning of the gods and all that good stuff.

I discovered is all my practice in functional languages over the last few months means that I can put together a recursive function pretty quickly and accurately. Unfortunately I also discovered I can’t come up with a decent name when typing - and I also found out that there’s little appetite for a refactor in a Dojo. That function’s name is my eternal shame.⁶

We had something fairly decent by the end of the Dojo. More exiciting was seeing what the other teams had produced. One team had made this glorious and terse looking almost one liner (and it really could have done with being put on a few more lines) that seemed to have more functionality than I could believe. Another team practiced their TDD⁷ and also created and elegant ‘word shifting’ move that provided the word-nextWord pairs without any recursion. And the final team wrote no code per se, but spent a productive few hours setting up a Clojure project and investigating the useful libraries that could help in the project.

I feel that I could see more of what the fuss about Clojure was about. Each team had thought about the nature of the data they were going to create and work on, linking it to the functions they were using to translate the input into the output. The beauty came in the diverse implementations, both in data and functions, and just how terse yet expressive both were. It’s left me wanting more.

A friendly atmosphere, enthusiastic programmers, a great language and problem to play with - and did I mention the pizza? I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Many, many thanks to Chris Ford for organising and Thoughtworks for hosting!