The workshop will be conducted over two days.
We will go over installation on IDEs and setup of development environment on all attendees laptops. We’ll use NightCode which should work out of the box on most OSes. It will prompt you to install JDK and JRE, please do that.
Once NightCode is setup, one can download this repository on their machines and open it in NightCode. The directory contains a file called bridge.clj which can then be opened up with the InstaREPL feature of NightCode. InstaREPL automatically evaluates every expression in the file on the left-hand pane. This file has some very basic opening content that one can evaluate, we’ll build upon it as we go through the lessons.
After installation, we will go over the following topics on the first day:
- What is programming
- What is Clojure
- Why did we choose Clojure
- Taster into a few Clojure things on the REPL
First off, we will have the teachers do a quick double check for everyone’s IDE and REPL setup from last evening.
The second day will be crash course in Clojure. We will divide the day into two parts - learning and doing.
In the learning section, we will go over the basics of Clojure in a presentation style while doing exercises as we come across them in the REPL. We have broken down the content into the following chapters:
- Understanding the REPL [10 mins]
- Syntax, or the anatomy of an s-expression [15 mins]
- Simple data types - string, bool and numbers (infix vs. prefix notation) [20 mins]
- Special data types - symbols and keywords (introduce def) [20 mins]
- Functions (built-in fns, def, fn) [25 mins]
- Sequence / Collection types and associated functions [30 mins]
- Context and bindings (let) [20 mins]
- Control flow and logic (if, when, do) [20 mins]
- Composition of functions [15 mins]
We will go over the exercises in the exercises folder in the repo - quidditch, land-of-wizards and mars-rover.
We can do these exercises in smaller groups with a teacher assigned to each group.