Hi, This semester I'm teaching a course at MSc studies, and I decided to base it on Clojure. Sorry, It's not a sign that Clojure gets the ground in USA - I'm in South-Eastern Europe, at University of Belgrade (cca 90.000 students altogether, the largest university in the region, but underdeveloped economy comparing to EU). The course title is not that important, as I am free to organize it as I like (for the curious, it's "Tools and Methods of Software Engineering").
In this region, Lisp is non-existent in the industry, which is usually based on Java, Oracle stack or Microsoft stack, plus the usual PHP in smaller projects and with the hobbyist crowd. The undergraduate courses are based on Java and in a smaller extent C#, so it's a usual "traditional" programming mindset. The faculty I'm teaching at is an exotic mixture of management / information systems departments, so even inf. syst. students attend more management-related than IS-related courses. So, not many typical geeks are going to be in the crowd. This course is a part of Software Engineering module that does not exist at undergraduate level, only Master/PhD. I expect 30 students total, 10 active and interested, 10 in the middle, and 10 that just want to pass. I'm going to use Stuart's book as a referent literature, but the courses I teach are usually interactive and not that structured because I want to engage students to start coding and exploring as soon as possible and I am willing to go to whatever direction seems interesting to them and me. There is a method to the madness, though :) The goal of the course is to show them alternative/emerging languages for the JVM. Because the industry is strongly traditional, and there is little startup opportunity (keep in mind that this is not USA) I do not expect anything more than them to be able to be ready to adopt one of such languages if needed at one point of time in the future. I hope that I'll also be able to do some research. The issue that is particularly interesting to me to explore is how alien Clojure is to Java programmers, what are subjective and objective causes, and how hard is to overcome each of the identified issues. I am pretty sure my students had no previous contact with Lisp dialects, some of them probably coded PHP, and there may even be someone who had some contact with Erlang/Ruby etc. I personally learned programming with Java, and Clojure was my first contact with Lisp. Common Lisp is still something that I would not use but Clojure was pretty easy to familiarize with, and looks to me as JavaLisp :) Any suggestion, especially related to the research part, would be helpful :)
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