Hi all, Today we hosted the second weekly Clojure workshop at my office in Dundee, Scotland. Prior to the event I thought we'd use labrepl as a convenient way to deliver some simple tutorial/exercises along with a working Clojure environment.
The event was reasonably successful but there were some inevitable installation issues with Clojure and labrepl. We had one Emacs guy choose to use a command line install via leiningen. With a helping hand from me, we got him up and running within a few minutes, with few problems... The only problem he encountered (and why I stepped in) was when he struggled a little to figure out how to install leiningen. lein's install is easy, though punting to the lein documentation for the leiningen install process makes it somewhat awkward to find the install link. This could be fixed by simply including a link to the lieningen install script from the labrepl page itself; just like is done for Enclojure. This environment proved the most painless to setup, though he lacked Emacs & Editor integration.... The reason he opted for the Command Line install was because I urged him to avoid setting up Emacs just now (as it can be a slippery slope... especially when dealing with someone who already had an extensive set of Emacs customisations). I figure he'll work this out himself in his own time. The remaining two users, opted for Netbeans + Enclojure, as judging by the labrepl docs this seemed to be the easiest. The first guy had some problems with his initial installation. Firstly nbgit threw an error about authentication when trying to clone the git repo. This same error was encountered by everyone running Netbeans, including myself when I tried it out yesterday. Fortunately the guy who was running this under OS X had already got git installed, so he managed to clone labrepl with git, and point netbeans at the labrepl directory... Unfortunately here he encountered another issue I also encountered, which is that some versions of Netbeans don't seem to ship with maven support built in, meaning it's not possible to open the labrepl project under Netbeans, without installing the Maven plugin. I'm not yet entirely sure which versions, or under what circumstances Netbeans lacks maven support. But installing the maven plugin solved this issue. From this point on this installation was clean sailing. The other issue another user at the meeting faced was that the labrepl web pages displayed without any styling/css or code samples... Sadly he had rebooted switching into OS X (from Windows 7) just before Rich managed to answer my query on #clojure IRC. Though apparently Rich's suspicions were true, and that he hadn't installed the latest Enclojure nbm, and was still using a previous version. This said, he claimed to run into the same problem under OS-X with a new install (though we didn't have time to look into this further). Anyway, other than these installation issues (which sadly took up a bit more time than I would have liked), labrepl was well received... It seemed to provide a nice structure to the evening, and allowed me to introduce an experienced O-CAML post-doc Computer Science researcher to Clojure. Coming from no Lisp/Clojure experience he left impressed with the language and with a desire to explore further. He even said he was considering it for future academic work! He particularly liked how lazy sequences were a core language property and idiomatic. (Apparently O-CAML has lazy sequences but many API's don't use them as they're not core). Anyway, I hope these third hand bug reports are relevant to further improving the labrepl docs and installation process. Thanks again to Stuart Halloway for labrepl, and also to Rich, who is still proving to be the best evangelist and ambassador for a language one could hope for, as everyone at the event was amazed when Rich himself helped me diagnose the cause of one of the labrepl installation problems... cheers Rich! This kind of commitment doesn't go unnoticed! -- Rick Moynihan http://twitter.com/RickMoynihan http://delicious.com/InkyHarmonics http://sourcesmouth.co.uk/ -- 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 Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. 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 To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
