Clojure Behind the Scenes

Brief history

Clojure is a young language. It was designed in 2005 and released in 2007 by Rich Hickey, a distinguished software engineer. The main idea was to have a practical functional language that would be a great fit for general problems. Plus, it would be more appealing for use in the industry. Before Clojure, functional programming languages were usually only approached in an academic environment.

Functional programming in an academic context

One of the foremost reasons for functional programming mostly being used in academic environments was the difficulty of setting up a working environment for people to start coding. Not only that, but the different way of thinking needed was also an obstacle. So, only people interested in evolving this idea would try to learn it. Not even undergraduate courses would have functional programming languages in their curriculum. And we can’t say that this has evolved a lot because there’s still little encouragement from those institutions to learn it.

Languages over time

The first functional programming language was released in the 1950s, and it was called Lisp. Remember this name because it’s an important part of what Clojure is today. Lisp is a remarkable language that is still used even after 70 years. Nevertheless, at the time functional programming was first released, other widely accepted programming languages were released simultaneously.