Beginners' night ideas

[Brian Maddy]

At the last meeting Greg, Daniel, Chris, and I chatted some about the
beginners' night idea. Here's some of the stuff we came up with. Does
anyone else have thoughts or other ideas?

The main idea: Do an intro to Clojure talk at a local user group and
have talks at our next meeting that are geared toward beginner topics.

Ideas of groups to talk at:
java
RUM (ruby)
PyMNtos (python)
javascript
Groovy

Format of talks at other groups:
clojure's philosophy (concurrency, persistent data structures, STM,
more ideas here - http://clojure.org/rationale)
Clojure basics; look at Stuart Halloway's slides for ideas -
https://github.com/stuarthalloway/clojure-presentations/downloads
* show javascript interop at the javascript group (instead of java)
* idea for rebutting the "infix is better" argument
* ((a == c) && (b == c)) || ((x < y) && (y < z))
* (or (= a b c) (< x y z))
take a problem in the native language, shrink it down into clojure code
getting started
* 4clojure
* clojuredocs.org
* clojure.org

Things to do at a beginners' night:
how to set up your environment
start going through labrepl - https://github.com/relevance/labrepl

Ideas for future beginners' night talks:
STM functions
testing
getting up and running with clojurescript (after the javascript group)

Questions:
how long are presentations at other user groups?
RUM: 25-35 min