Clojure in the Age of Language Models

In the age of generative models, the developer must be able to recognize the shape of the problem and pick the correct way to express it. What becomes important today is understanding algorithms and data structures and data flows within the system. Imperative programming is quickly becoming akin to writing assembly because these models are quite competent at writing code in the small, while they stumble at high level design and architecture. So it is good to learn a language that operates at a higher level, such as Clojure, which is data-centric, composes functions declaratively, and keeps code close to the shape of the problem.LLMs can generate code much quicker than I can, but the issue is how you test that the generated code does what you want. Before you can test anything in many languages, you have to recompile the program, and that may take quite a few minutes when your program gets large. The length of that feedback cycle sets the pace of your progress.We also need to talk…