Clojure in Academia - Jim Newton (Clojure/Conj 2026)

What happens when you introduce Clojure and functional programming to students who aren’t looking for it? At EPITA (Paris), we teach a course on functional programming using Clojure, focused on immutability, recursion, and lazy evaluation. Most students don’t fully “get it” by the end. A few do—and that difference is striking. This talk is a candid look at that gap. Which ideas consistently fail to land? What clicks for the minority who connect with the model? How do constraints of a traditional curriculum shape the outcome? We’ll also share the exercises and infrastructure we use to run the course at scale, and what they reveal about learning (and not learning) Clojure. An honest account of teaching FP with Clojure: partial success, unexpected insights, and open questions. Speaker: Jim Newton, Assistant Research Professor at EPITA Jim 38 years as Lisp programmer, and assistant research professor, teaching mathematics and programming at an international, Paris based engineering school. 0:00 Introduction and overview 1:21 Teaching philosophy 2:18 Course content and design 12:26 Grading mechanics 12:47 Surveys and student feedback 13:54 What fails to land 16:50 What lands 17:17 The grade puzzle 18:37 Academic performance dynamics 19:19 The LLM question 20:01 Data on submission trends 20:11 Interpreting learning trends 21:43 Final perspectives and questions 24:16 Course resources and conclusion