My current leisure-time project is porting the examples from Peter Seibel's excellent Practical Common Lisp (PCL) to Clojure.

I think Clojure is interesting for three reasons:

1. Clojure is Lisp, but minus historical baggage.
2. Clojure gives full access to the JVM and Java libraries.
3. Clojure groks concurrency and state.

My ground rules are simple:

• I am not going to port everything, just the code samples that interest me as I re-read Practical Common Lisp.
• Where Peter introduced Common Lisp features in a planned progression, I plan to use whatever Clojure feature come to mind. So I may jump straight into more "advanced" topics, even in the intro chapters.

Please do not assume that this port is a good introduction to Common Lisp! I am cherry-picking examples that are interesting to me from a Clojure perspective. If you want to learn Common Lisp, read PCL. In fact, you should probably read the relevant chapters in PCL first, no matter what.

The Series

• Intro (this post)
• Chapter 3. Practical: A Simple Database
• Chapter 5. Functions
• Chapter 6. Variables
• Chapter 7. Macros: Standard Control Constructs
• Chapter 8. Macros: Defining Your Own
• Chapter 9. Practical: A Unit Test Framework
• Chapter 10. Numbers, Characters, and Strings
• Chapter 11. Collections
• Chapter 16. Object Reorientation: Generic Functions
• Chapter 17. Object Reorientation: Classes

Talks

I am available to give conference talks on Clojure. Check the schedule for an event near you, or contact Relevance (info@thinkrelevance.com) to schedule an event.

Notes

• The git repository for the sample code is at http://github.com/stuarthalloway/practical-cl-clojure.
• Hat tip to Ola Bini who is working on a similar idea, porting PAIP to Ruby.