clojureD 2018: "Maria: A beginner-friendly coding environment for Clojure" by Dave Liepmann

Dave Liepmann introduces Maria, an interactive, web-based Clojure environment designed to simplify learning programming without tooling overhead.

A recurring problem newcomers have with Clojure is that one must learn everything at once: the host language, and stack traces, and a new editor, and functional programming, and and and…. What if we shielded beginners from the complexity of tooling, stack traces, and programming language theory? What if we got out of their way and let them feel the power of programming for themselves, right away? The Maria project, named for educational pioneer Maria Montessori, aims to delay as many of these obstacles as possible so that new coders can get right to playing, building, exploring, and sharing with code. In this talk, the creators will demo their live „code playground“, explain its pedagogical philosophy, share how it worked with first-time coders at ClojureBridge Berlin, and brainstorm what’s next.