Clojure is a dialect of LISP that is parasitic, hijacking popular host platforms like Java and JavaScript and enabling them to be suitable for functional programming, in a language that actually makes sense! We will take a brief tour of the languages available for various types of software and the general paradigms they represent, focusing on the functional style and its strengths, and how Clojure can be an ideal way to get into coding today.

Functional programming is getting a lot of attention lately, and as a result of its benefits is becoming a skill that is in increasingly high demand. Functional languages, historically however, have tended to be very academic and not very practical or accessible. This area of the software development landscape is currently changing extremely rapidly, and what we are experiencing is a very exciting time when LISP, a language mostly confined to Computer Science 101, is actually being used by real companies to build complex systems. We will learn how we can use this information to our advantage, exploring the bleeding edge of software technology.