Closure

I've heard nice things about Clojure. Stuart Halloway has a book (Programming Clojure) out through the Pragmatic Programmers. The book grew out of Stuart's Java.next series of articles. There's also a podcast.

Clojure, like Scala, is functional programming for the JVM. Scala (which I fooled around with a little) descends from the ML/Caml/O-caml family of languages with an emphasis on pattern matching and static typing with type inference. Clojure is a dynamic Ruby-influenced dialect of Lisp specifically targeted to the JVM (hence the j). Yet another programming language on the digithead's cool-technology-I-want-to-play-with list.

Update

• Clojure elevator pitch
• Clojure tutorial slides and video
• Matt Sears' Clojure links
• Mark Volkmann's Clojure tutorial
• Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics
• Labrepl is an environment for exploring the Clojure language
• Clojure links from a commenter on Hacker News
• Thoughts on Clojure
• Book: Joy of Clojure