Ep 038: How Do I Convince My Coworkers to Use Clojure?

Functional Design in Clojure

Each week, we answer a different question about Clojure and functional programming.

If you have a question you'd like us to discuss, tweet @clojuredesign, send an email to [email protected], or join the #clojuredesign-podcast channel on the Clojurians Slack.

This week, the question is: "How do I convince my coworkers to use Clojure?". We recall our own experiences evangelizing Clojure and give practical advice from the trenches.

Selected quotes:

• "Don't assume someone is going to want to jump on the grenade."
• "There are actually two steps: 1. Convince people that Clojure is a good thing. 2. Get people to actually use it."
• "Lambda as in AWS Lambda, not as in Clojure lambda. They stole our cool word!"
• "By the way, that solution came from Clojure."
• "Get people thinking in the functional direction."
• "There are only two types of tools: those that you hate and those you don't use."
• "When people get stuck, they think it's the language's fault, because it has chosen to categorically eliminate solutions that they, as a developer, have relied on for years."
• "The path to Clojure adoption is primarily social, not technical."

Related episodes:

• 024: You Are Here, But Why?