Getting Help from the Community

The 3 main places to get help with Clojure, in no particular order, are:

• IRC (#clojure on freenode)
• the mailing list / discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure (Note: messages from new members are moderated and may take a little while to appear.)
• StackOverflow Clojure questions

When using IRC, if you’ve got example code you wish to ask about, you might post it to the Clojure community’s very own Refheap paste-bin.

There are at least 2 bots usually residing on #clojure, and they both can evaluate code for you:

clojurebot

Usage example:    ,(+ 1 1) lazybot

Usage example:    &(+ 1 1)

Usage example with surrounding text:    this is ##(println "just") a test

If you want to send someone on IRC a message, but they’re not logged in at the moment, lazybot can save the message and deliver it next time they’re on IRC. For example, to send amalloy such a message:

$mail amalloy Thanks for the help earlier!

If someone queues such a message for you, you retrieve it (as lazybot will tell you) by messaging lazybot like so:

/msg lazybot mail

To see when the last time someone sent a message to the list, do:

$seen their-nick

Logs for #clojure are available at:

• http://clojure-log.n01se.net/
• http://logs.lazybot.org/irc.freenode.net/%23clojure

And, as always — regardless of venue — courtesy counts. :)