Pre-West Interview: Gary Fredericks

April 09, 2015

This interview was graciously conducted by Nola Stowe. She's a programmer, the co-founder of DevChix, and a prolific teacher. She recently ran ClojureBridge Austin. Please shout out to her and say thanks!

Introduction

Gary Fredericks is the next interview participant. He is giving a talk at Clojure/West about Random number generation. The background to his talk is available, if you like.

Interview with Gary Fredericks

Nola: How long have you been doing Clojure and how did you get into it?

Gary: I started using Clojure in 2009 at my first full-time software job. The person I reported to was interested in experimenting with new languages.

Nola: What languages did you do before Clojure?

Gary: I learned Clojure in parallel with Ruby, Erlang, and Scala; prior to that I had only programmed as a hobby (TI-BASIC and JavaScript, both due to platform monopoly), for undergrad CS classes (Java), and for a couple minor jobs (both with C++).

Nola: What editor do you use and what is a typical workflow?

Gary: I use emacs with cider, making heavy use of the repl and in-buffer evaluation (especially dedicated scratch files for more serious efforts). I also try to invest in improving my clojure environment via my leiningen profiles and a repl utilities library.

Nola: Can you describe a good use-case for Clojure that you see has an advantage over another language?

Gary: I think Clojure has a pretty general-purpose emphasis. The result is if you buy its value proposition you'll want to use it for a broad range of things, and if you don't you'll probably not want to use it for anything, as the cost of using a less popular language will be too high.

Nola: What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen Clojure REPL?

Gary:

$ time echo '(System/exit 0)' | java -jar clojure-1.6.0.jar
Clojure 1.6.0 user=>
real 0m0.928s user 0m1.431s sys 0m0.053s

Nola: Thanks for the interview. It was very informative.

This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.

That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.

Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.

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