After I recently got interested in Clojure, I decided to use it for a small “project”, namely a script which will download all the enclosures from an RSS 2.0 feed to the current working directory. The program itself is very concise, with only 9 lines of actual code (the rest are comments and library imports).

My impressions: for somebody with little previous exposure to Lisp (some CL and very little Scheme) and no Java background the learning curve can be a bit steep in the beginning, especially since documentation is still a bit (too) sparse. However, if you are willing to spend some time on Google or reading the actual source code of Clojure and clojure-contrib you’ll generally find what you are looking for. Besides that people in the Clojure community seem to be quite friendly and my question on #clojure got satisfactorily answered within a minute.

It’s a definitely too early for any real assessment of the language, but I quite like what I saw so far, so there probably will be some more Clojure-related posts in the near future.

Some links to get you started:
Clojure API
An overview of clojure.contrib
Clojure – Functional Programming for the JVM
20 Clojure links to get you up to speed
Learning Clojure and Emacs