We're safely into the weeds now. I'm of two minds about continuing to
participate in the thread since it's gone so far off the tracks, but
here goes.
No language changes have been suggested or discussed -- everything's
been in the realm of tooling, documentation, release process, etc. etc.
There's nothing to be gained from talking up the complexity of
Clojure, real or imagined, no matter how good it might make you feel.
Presumably you don't think your characterization could be taken as
insulting by any number of people, and unfair to some I know
personally that have impeccable technical capabilities but still have
struggled getting started with Clojure.
The original blog post talked about the "big 3" IDEs (not Notepad),
and I've used at least one of them daily for over 10 years now;
perhaps I should upgrade from my zip-file-based version control as well?
No one would ask *you* to use documentation, tools, or other
affordances in order to make using Clojure easier, but don't begrudge
those that wish and ask for such things.
- Chas
On Jun 29, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Brian Hurt wrote:
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Chas Emerick
<cemer...@snowtide.com> wrote:
The discussion about newcomers is *not* about what one needs to know
or should know in order to build über-complicated applications for
deployment in "production" -- it's about what the learning curve
looks and feels like to various constituencies.
No. This discussion is/was about (non-specific) changes being
proposed to Clojure. And the making the word "constituencies"
plural implies "more than one", when only one constituency has been
advocated for in the entire discussion- the constituency of
programmers whose heads explode if they are introduced to editors
more complicated than notepad, version control more complicated than
backing up floppy (USB keychain nowadays, I'd guess), build
environments more complicated than "click run", and more than one
choice in any of the above.
And before you get on me about my characterization here, these
aren't the assumptions I'm making, these are assumptions other
people in this thread (including the original blog post) are
making. They're just not phrased quite so bluntly.
Any talk about how Clojure might be "too much" for some, for
whatever reason, is out of bounds IMO. Clojure, as a language, is
*simpler* than just about all of the popular alternatives out there,
and the language is eminently approachable and practical for
programmers from varying domains and with varying levels of
experience.
Ignoring the Java side of things, and for a specific definition of
"simple", this may be correct. But you can't ignore the Java side
of things when measuring complexity. Even relatively simple things,
like opening up a network socket, require you to interact with Java.
Ever seen the cockpit of a 747?
Brian
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