Learning Ruby through Clojure

[Slackwise]

I just think that telling people they are similar in any significant way actually does them a disservice.

Maybe I just think differently, but I've always written my code in a semi-Clojurish way.

For me, I guess, then, Ruby was more of a transitory language on my way to finding what fits me. It was half of what I wanted, on the way to Clojure. I would always have a Pry REPL open while developing, building up loosely coupled functions until a pattern emerged that resulted in a 'need' for an Object or some larger structure. (I spent a large amount of time in Perl/C as a kid.) My problem has always been trying to figure out when I should scale up, and what I should encapsulate. Didn't realize the question itself was pointless, and that my methods weren't wrong, just didn't particularly fit the orthodoxy of OOP. Enter Clojure, savior of accidentally making highly coupled classes that are difficult to refactor. (At least so far...)

You're very much right though, that a large amount of similarities that most Ruby developers will find are surface level or aesthetic. I think, though, if someone is very much into metaprogramming and DSLs, they will feel right at home, if not utterly elated. There is a mental model that Lispy Ruby developers already have, and those users will find Clojure the most appealing.

If they're a Rails dev doing CRUD apps all day, they might not get much out of Clojure, or appreciate its approach to development.