solving.md

Looking for more resources? See Clojure Camp Handbook

Learning “Programmatic Problem Solving”

If Clojure is your first programming language, you’re not only learning Clojure, but “how to program in general”.

• “learning to program” consists largely of:

  • developing a mental model of how the “virtual machine” works
    • ie. how Clojure+JVM evaluates your code
  • building your “toolkit”
    • functions (and higher-level patterns) you know how to use
  • learning to “convert word problems” to code, break problems down into smaller problems, and debug

• programming, then, becomes:

  • understanding what the “virtual machine” can do, and applying the various things a language provides to control it, in order to make it do you want it to do

• Raf’s gentle introduce to “what is programming even?" (very WIP)

  • https://cognitory.github.io/introduction-to-programming/

• when solving a problem, “do what you know”, and “mock out” code that you don’t

  • if you can break down a problem into “part that I know” and “part that I don’t know how to do”, you can implement “part that I know” and make up a function that does “what you don’t know” (and later figure out how to implement it)

• a “proper” debugging process is important

  • improper: willy-nilly modifying some code to see if it fixes things
  • proper:
    • understanding why the code as is is doing what it is doing (throwing an error, giving a wrong result)
      • narrowing down via “print statement debugging” (or using tap) or a debugger

• “programming in practice” is a infinite rabbit hole, because there are very many different systems to learn (ie. just learning Clojure lets you program command-line apps, but, to learn web, you need to learn how browser “virtual machines” work)