I spent this weekend diving back into Clojure or more specifically, Clojurescript. For those who don't know, Clojure is a Lisp that runs on the JVM. The solution it particularly seeks to "solve" is immutability. Clojurescript is Clojure that compiles to Javascript for web applications. Tooling aside, it's all pretty neat. I didn't do anything earth shaking, just a quick implementation of Conway's game of life and Snake. While the code isn't particularly good, you can check them out here (Snake, Life).

I was catching up with the team at Stuy the other day and they mentioned that they were periodically getting pushback on their choice of languages, particularly in the intro class. The pushback was mostly in the form of "why don't you start them with Javascript?" Back in the day, when I created our intro class where we use Scheme, NetLogo and then later Python, I'd get similar pushback but then it was "why not Java?