On Mar 23, 2011, at 8:26 PM, Armando Blancas wrote: >> I have been offered money >> to program in java in the past. I turned it down, turning the phrase >> "you couldn't pay me to program in java" into a reality. It's fair to >> state that I hate java more than any other language. I'd rather >> program in COBOL than java. > > That's quite alright. Nine out of ten people here hate java; even > people who love java hate java, that's normal. If you have the > interest and motivation to do some cool things with this technology -- > work or fun-- hang in there and after a while all that pain becomes > just a chore; that's when you've come to grips with it, as Mike said. > The last time I felt that pain was last year when I learned maven to > write my clojure apps. It was painful but they helped in this board > and now I'm OK with it. 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.
You certainly don't need to know much of anything about Java-the-language, but it's hard to get very far without understanding how the JVM works, at least in some critical (and basic) ways. Perhaps a (bad) analogy might be the relationship between e.g. Python and POSIX. A lot of what makes python great is that it provides a great abstraction for various system-level libraries and services that are defined by POSIX. Not having even a rudimentary understanding of those underpinnings will always put you at a disadvantage. In any case, Clojure is *very* young. All of the tooling available for it currently has been assembled by volunteers in the community, all of which are (understandably, I think) scratching their own itches, most of which are inevitably not going to be those felt by total greenhorns. That tooling will get better, and will become more and more palatable to newcomers, but it's not going to happen overnight. FWIW, it looks like effective introductory/educational environments for Java started appearing *years* after it was introduced (looks like BlueJ came out 5-6 years after Java 1.0? [1]). We'll get there, and probably in far less time. :-) - Chas [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueJ -- 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
