On Mar 23, 2011, at 8:26 PM, Armando Blancas wrote: > But there's no question that to use Clojure > you need a good grasp of java, the language and infrastructure, no way > around that. Once you learn that you might hate it some more.
I don't think that has to be true. It depends both on what you're using the language for and the tools that are made available. I almost never need java interop for the things that I do, and if the tool options were a little better then I would be able to remain blissfully ignorant of java infrastructure as well. By "if the tools were a little better" I mean "if there was a beginner-friendly and background-agnostic option for editing and running programs, and managing simple projects, without complicated installation or configuration (it should be a one-click download/install!) or a steep learning curve for any of the pieces." There are a couple of good options for all of the pieces of this, but IMHO nothing that handles them all reasonably well simultaneously. But I do think it's possible, that several projects are close to achieving this from different directions, and that people in this community could make it happen if they appreciated the need. FWIW the thing that seems closest to me, that I've seen, is textmate-clojure: it uses cake to provide a straightforward, flexible, and community-idiomatic way to run and manage projects, and it provides language-aware editing that's simple to set up and has almost no learning curve. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be actively supported and issues posted on the github site several months ago haven't been addressed. And it's not cross-platform (which doesn't bother me too much since I generally work in Mac OS). But still, it's an existence proof for a reasonable solution to many of the problems that the OP raised (and many problems that I have using and teaching Clojure). If there was an actively supported, cross-platform system that does what textmate-clojure almost does, and if a pointer to such a thing could be on the clojure.org getting started page, then I think that new users would have a vastly better experience and that the entire community would benefit. -Lee -- 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
