Reviews
The ambitions of this book are immense and at its best moments it reaches them and you see the contours of a way of a thinking about programming that feels truly enlightened. However, there are perhaps just as many times when it becomes bogged down in writing about what it's trying to do and fails to get into the nitty gritty of examples and explication that would really step you through its argument. Part of the problem is that you imagine Tellman started writing about the Clojure programming language before realising that what he really wanted to do was write about programming far more broadly. This leaves the book with an imbalance that affects the entire enterprise. Tellman's next book will apparently be focused on programming at a more generic level and I very much look forward to it: he's clearly got a lot to say.