I'm currently going through the advent of code challenges (http://adventofcode.com) with Clojure and watch a few talks (https://www.youtube.com/user/ClojureTV) next to it.

The cool thing about the challenges is that they are language agnostic so you can try whatever you're interested in (CL, Scheme, Racket, Clojure, …). A bit like Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net) but more fun.

Hey tosh! Funny seeing you here (especially mere hours after I replied to you on Reddit)

AoC is great. I've been doing it in Scheme. Except today's challenge, which I did in AWK, because it was perfectly suited for the task (although I could have also used the AWK scheme macro). Plus, in Scheme, you don't wind up with code like this

  {if(($1+$2>$3)&&($1+$3>$2)&&($2+$3>$1)) count++;} END {print count}

Aren't one-liners fun?

Feedback is very helpful in learning. It's why so many of us get such satisfaction out of building physical things or making art. It's because the feedback is immediate, among other things.

It's more abstract with programming, but programming a website gives pretty good and immediate feedback. Plus you can show it off.

So even though I'm not a web dev, I still think learning to build a dynamic website or web tool or service is a really great way to get introduced to a language. It will give you a rooting that you start branching out from.

Clojure in particular is pretty good at the web dev thing. I'd just stick to server stuff to start with personally.

I was the same way. The MP3 database example was odd. I was thinking it could be implemented in any language as a dictionary...no big deal.

I found the interesting part of that chapter was creating a macro to ingest search clauses and generate 'where' functions to search the MP3 database.