Pre-West Interview: Luke VanderHart
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This summary was graciously written by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Talk: The ReactJS Landscape
Luke Vanderhart's talk at Clojure/West is about the ReactJS Landscape.
Background
ReactJS appeared from Facebook last year in silence and without fanfare (from my view anyways!) but recent months has had an explosion on the web frameworks space, in particular in Clojure because of the common thread of immutablility running through the core concepts.
Since Facebook announced it in June, we have seen several incarnations of React in Clojure: Om, Quiescent, and Reagent.
Why it matters
ReactJS is the View in MVC apps and is a declarative library for describing a user interface, it can figure out what parts of the application to redraw on an update. With the popularity of single page applciations this is key to making a fast and responsive user interface.
About Luke Vanderhart
Luke is the co-author of two books: Clojure Cookbook and ClojureScript Up And Running.
This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!
Introduction
Luke VanderHart is the next interview participant. He is giving a talk at Clojure/West about the ReactJS Landscape. The background to his talk is available, if you like.
Interview with Luke VanderHart
Nola: How long have you been doing Clojure and how did you get into it?
Luke: I started using Clojure in 2008, shortly after its release. I had become interested in learning a Lisp, and since I was a Java programmer up to that point I was looking for one hosted on the JVM. Fortuitously, Clojure had just been released and so I found it and started playing with it.
Nola: What suggestions do you have for someone getting started with Clojure?
Luke: Find the simplest editor that works for you, don't try to learn a new editor at the same time you're learning a new language. Don't worry about the more complex language features or libraries - just geting a good grasp of the basics (namespaces, data structures, functions, let-blocks, higher-order-functions) will give you 95% of the power of Clojure. The rest will come easily.
Nola: Your talk is about the different incarnations of reactjs in clojure, what attracted you to it? Were you big into javascript before?
Luke: I am a long-time UI programmer and have worked with all kinds of user interfaces, from 3D games to Swing to HTML to various JS libraries. It's always been a frustrating experience. I am excited about React and its associated libraries because it's the first approach to UI development that strikes me as elegant and usable.
Nola: What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen Clojure REPL?
Luke: About 11000 miles per second. Based on my latency to the REPL I'm running in a remote data center right now :)
Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.