Mibu <mibu.cloj...@gmail.com> writes: > I recommended clojure to a dozen friends or so and after a while none > of them stuck with it. I know clojure being a lisp and being at the > current development stage is not for everyone, but after I probed why > people gave up with it I saw the barriers to entry were largely > superficial and can be easily solved with some clarifications: > > The most problematic issue is the editor. There are too many options > to check and to choose from and there is no "best" option. I remember > I got analysis paralysis myself when I had to choose an environment > (thinking about configuring slime takes the zest away out of any > exciting new language). If you go with emacs+clojure-mode, you get > something very basic and for those not familiar with emacs, something > that looks very foreign. You want the powerful slime? You will be > exhausted with its setup or worse, defeated by it. The netbeans and > eclipse IDEs are still shaky. People usually tried to install > enclojure because its site looks the slickest but even with the alpha > tag the experience was disappointing to all. People who got my > recommendation after netbeans released v6.5 couldn't get enclojure to > run at all. > > I think the solution to this problem is to give a definitive > recommendation to a single simple editing option at the Getting > Started section and enumerate the other options with their ups and > downs, so people will have the right expectations about them. [...]
I don't buy it. When you start using Python, nobody handholds you so that you can pick an editor. You just use whatever you have. So what's the deal here? Let people use whatever they want, try their stuff from the command-line and REPL, and once they get used to it, move up to Emacs and SLIME. I agree there are superficial barriers, though. I believe it is very important for Clojure to: a) have an build process that results in something that you can run from your command line right away (without learning about the syntax of java command-line arguments), b) have an easy and standardized way of installing and accessing libraries (for example, I am happy with Emacs/SLIME, but I do not know how to install and use clojure.contrib yet!), c) quickly develop a working module/library building system with automatic downloads. CPAN is what made Perl popular. This is something that Common Lisp failed horribly at. In general, prefer practicality over dogma. Common Lisp still hasn't dug itself out from the "filesystem? what filesystem? we have our ultra-flexible maxi-portable mega-abstractions called 'pathnames' that let us (theoretically) run the software unchanged on 75 dead platforms". A pity no one can actually use them correctly. And there still is no agreed-upon schema for installing libraries in the filesystem. If we don't get this right quickly, the result will be that core developers will know where to put stuff, and new users won't, resulting in lots of frustration, while core developers won't even understand what the problem is. --J. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
