I spent Thursday and Friday last week attending the first Clojure conference outside of the US – Euroclojure – in London. I’ve got to say that I’ve come back feeling really excited by what I saw there.
I’ve been to many conferences before and this one was quite small in comparison with those. However, with 200 enthusiastic coders from the UK, Europe, the US and Canada, it was a really great and friendly place to be. More importantly there were plenty of great ideas talked about as well.
Clojure is a really exciting young language. It’s embracement of the Java and the JVM has allowed many at the conference to bring in elegant solutions to existing legacy (Java) software without wholesale rewrites. In every case this has been achieved with less code and faster results. That has to be great news!
Better still was hearing about the things that are really fresh and new such as experimenting with dynamic programming of music in Overtone (like modifying waveforms in real time to see how the sound is affected) or demonstrating JS Bach’s Canons in Overtone or dynamic algorithmic art displays using Clojure. Not that programming is just about art! There were also great talks on logic programming, solving concurrency issues in databases with Datomic, automating deployments in the Cloud with Pallet, and data processing in Hadoop with Cascalog to name a few.
So many talks in such a small amount of time was pretty mind blowing, especially given the heat, but meeting so many great people was fantastic. Roll on Euroclojure 2013!
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