I recently had the opportunity to chat with Stu Halloway (the author of “Programming Clojure” and the CTO and co-founder of Relevance) about, as you can probably guess, Clojure. Briefly, Clojure is a “dialect of Lisp” and “predominantly a functional programming language” and thus, has a lot of smart people excited. As Stu himself states in the podcast, Clojure “unleashes the power of the JVM” and (in my interpretation of his words) allows a singular focus on solving a problem. That is, Clojure facilitates expressing the essence of a solution with elegant and maintainable code. I must admit, I’ve been a bit of a skeptic of Lispy languages. I guess the fact that I had to learn and program some Lisp for a CS course in college has left a veritable scar on my conscience. You see, back then, C++ and this up and coming slow language for the web, dubbed Java, were “hot” and Lisp wasn’t even on the map of “cool” (at least for the people and companies I was hanging out with). Stu and the surrounding community’s excitement and passion for Clojure, however, has me re-engaging Lisp. I’ve even been reading Stu’s book! If you’re curious about Clojure, I highly recommend listing to Stu — he’s a super interesting person and his opinions on Object-Oriented programming, Patterns, and languages in general are quite interesting. Looking to spin up Continuous Integration quickly? Check out www.ciinabox.com. JavaRuby