On Jun 29, 2010, at 10:26 AM, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Actually, have you looked at jedit? It's the only free Java editor
> that isn't trying to be an IDE.
Thanks for this tip. I didn't know about jedit. I've grabbed it and see that it
has a built-in Clojure mode. Promising! Its idea of proper Clojure indentation
seems pretty nutty to me (you may have to view this in a monospace font to see
how odd it is):
(defn bar
"check out the formatting of the let and the placement of the last line"
[]
(let [x 1
y 2
z 3]
(list x y z)))
It gets weirder for some of my more complicated definitions.
But maybe I can tweak the settings to get something more reasonable (I've only
tried for a minute so far).
> Um, I've been watching the list for quite a while, and have never seen
> anyone with problems with just clojure-mode.
Well I had trouble with this and I think I posted about it and that others did
too. But in any event emacs isn't what I'm looking for.
> I think you're asking to much for the first step. They don't need
> clojure-specific indentation; they just need a simple-minded
> autoindent and paren matching. Those should be available in pretty
> much any editor. Clojure-specific is nice, but they can correct it by
> hand trivially.
Over many years of teaching Lisp to beginners the single most effective
debugging advice I've given is "first auto-indent it and then the error may
become obvious." Of course that works only for certain syntax errors but that
covers a lot of territory for beginners, and even helps me as a Lisper with
many years of experience. Correcting indentation by hand is easy when your code
is correct and you know what you're doing. Language-specific indentation is
really helpful when it's not already correct or you're just learning.
>> I think that several versions of "nearly the right stuff" are available but
>> that the bundling/instructions could be made a little more clear for
>> newcomers in every case that I know of (each case maybe needing a slightly
>> different tweak).
>
> If that's the case, is there some reason you haven't created this? I'd
> be more than happy to provide web space for it if you need it.
Because I don't know how, and I'm writing here because I know that many people
here do know how and have already done 90+% of the work. I can write you a
quantum computer simulator or an AI search engine or a genetic programming
engine or an ecological simulator or many other things in many languages
including Lisp and Clojure, but writing and packaging cross-platform editors
and development tools just isn't in my bag of tricks right now. I know it could
be, and maybe some day I'll acquire those skills, but many others are already
quite good at this stuff and have gone to considerable effort to create
environments that provide almost all of what I want. So I figure it's a service
to give my perspective on what small tweaks would make their efforts reach a
wider audience.
--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
lspec...@hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438
Check out Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines:
http://www.springer.com/10710 - http://gpemjournal.blogspot.com/
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