Please give a brief introduction of yourself

I am a hacker, FOSS enthusiast and budding entrepreneur. I build large
and scalable web applications. I mainly program using functional
programming tools and techniques.


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

In the past I have contributed to various projects like GNOME, Ubuntu,
Debian & Django. These days I hack in Clojure and might contribute to
the project in the near future. Apart from that I have some of my own
FOSS projects online on Github account


What will your talk be, exactly ?

It’s going to be an introduction to Clojure which is a very exciting
programming language for the JVM. I will talk about the pragmatic
benefits of using Clojure to build large-scale systems which are
concurrent, highly performant and dynamic.


What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect ?

My main accomplishment will be in getting people interested in trying
out Clojure for building serious applications.


Why did you chose clojure over other options ?

I wanted to use a programming language which is FOSS, very expressive,
dynamic, portable, performant and safe for concurrent programming.
Clojure has all the above and more.


What according to you are the important features that will make clojure the choice of language for masses?

  • Clojure is hosted on the JVM which is ubiquitous these days.
  • Clojure code is very succinct and very maintainable.
  • Clojure is mostly functional which makes building large applications easier.
  • Clojure has an STM implementation for controlled side-effects.
  • Clojure is fast!
  • Clojure has a great community
  • More!


What obstacles did you face while implementing your first application with clojure ?

Initially the documentation was very sparse. The situation has
improved a lot now. There is already one book on Clojure with three
more coming up soon. Another problem I faced was that since I had very
little experience with Java, it took me some time to be able to
understand some of the Java-isms in Clojure completely.


Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify?

Surely. GNUnify is one of the premier FOSS events in the country and it gets better every time.