I was thinking of trying to learn Clojure by experimenting with a 128 series monome and Ubuntu Studio, but it’s pretty hard work. I started with the “monome-serial” library and managed to get some recognition for button-presses today, but rxtx seems to be generally a bit of a PITA and I can’t seem to run the examples without locking errors on the serial port. I saw a note about the possibility of building rxtx with locking disabled, but…? Is it worth trying…? The examples are nearly a decade old now and I’m already chasing hacks and workarounds to get any sense out of it.
…then there seems to be another approach via OSC in Overtone, but I haven’t found any documented examples. I can follow tutorials, but I don’t have the knowledge to go off-piste. I’ve got Overtone/Supercollider working, and Python Grid Studies, but I need “Clojure Grid Studies”…it’s a bridge too far otherwise. Should I persevere with rxtx or is that ‘abandonware’…? Any thoughts welcome…I’d love to get past the basic config of serial/OSC handling and get on with some Lisp-like functions…
If you’re mostly interested in Clojure because it’s a Lisp you could pivot to Fennel which is a Lisp that compiles to Lua, so you could write Norns programs.
I was a career clojure developer for ten years! At one point I wrote some monome code that sent and received OSC messages. Worked well, had some fun with it. May revisit after I’ve more fully detoxed from my last gig. Clojure(script) is a truly fantastic and spectacularly powerful and flexible language. I’ve found the community to be one of the most engaged and intelligent I’ve been a part of as programmers go, although I can’t say much for their diversity.
I just looked through my GitHub and I couldn’t find a clean repo with the arc and grid code, if that’s something you’re interested in seeing let me know and I’m happy to dig it out next time at at my laptop for you!
Ah i found it! I have no idea if it still works, but I believe I used it within the last year or two. Let me know!
Fennel is an amazing language and you can get it to look even more like Clojure via some extensions in https://github.com/Olical/aniseed.
When I was working with it I had a little trouble finding nice examples of Fennel doing things like OSC or anything music related. Maybe folks have some nice projects they can point to that do Fennel music stuff?
Another thing that came up in project I did in Fennel, a ncurses-based poem manipulator (that I wanted to hook up to the ORCA sequencer): I couldn’t figure out how to show stacktraces properly, though I’m not sure if it was due to Fennel or the aniseed extensions
not much to add, but another clojure enthusiast (and former ~professional~) here that’s also quite bout it with the lines/monome community
Perhaps the monome <> processing studies would be useful? https://monome.org/grid-studies-processing/ (maybe also look at quil since that’s an idiotmatic-ish clojure wrapper around processing).
Perhaps you could try the 
