I like your post, and think we need more people like you doing this. One critique: I think you need to do a much better job explaining your first part on recursion.
You need to walk through exactly what you are doing in your sum function, because it is not at all clear to the uninitiated where in the hell the "acc" variable comes from. Instead of explaining any of this part, which is perhaps the most difficult part for a non-FP person to grasp, you jumped straight to "by the way, use loop when there's a lot of numbers."
My coworker's comments when I sent him the link:
"Ok, I get it...... what's going on with the sum?..... whaaat?"
Thanks for doing what you're doing. I look forward to reading more of your work.
Yes, that is a fantastic explanation. My coworker immediately got it, and was simultaneously blown away by the concept of "arity."
Please keep it up.
One area you may be interested in: I've recently been playing around with Incanter (a library for data analysis, similar to R or Python Pandas).
There is a distinct lack of tutorials for using it, and the documentation isn't exactly friendly....
The reason I mention it is because I think data analysis is a place where Clojure absolutely shines, and someone with your expertise could probably work it into useful examples.
Thanks for the suggestion! I know next to nothing about data analysis so I might not ever get around to using or writing about Incanter, but I've seen it in action and it looks super cool. Thanks again :)
You need to walk through exactly what you are doing in your sum function, because it is not at all clear to the uninitiated where in the hell the "acc" variable comes from. Instead of explaining any of this part, which is perhaps the most difficult part for a non-FP person to grasp, you jumped straight to "by the way, use loop when there's a lot of numbers."
My coworker's comments when I sent him the link:
"Ok, I get it...... what's going on with the sum?..... whaaat?"
Thanks for doing what you're doing. I look forward to reading more of your work.