There are several buggy behaviors of the Enclojure REPL that are
annoying me. Enclojure has gone through several upgrades over the past
year or two without any of these being fixed, despite the fact that
people have reported these problems more than once on the Enclojure
Google Group during that time.
The two biggies are these:
1. The project REPL does not start up reliably. Very often a big
error box full of mostly gobbledygook appears instead, the salient
part of which seems to say that a timeout was exceeded somewhere.
This is rare when using create project REPL from the menu but
unfortunately extremely common using the reset-REPL button in the
REPL pane itself.
Obviously, starting a (non-remote) REPL should work reliably,
rather than be intermittent and unpredictable like this.
2. The project REPL can get into an unusable state in a number of
ways. Besides the well-known curse of printing an infinite seq or
similar, there are a few cases that are clearly buggy behavior
and, in each case, may or may not be specific to Enclojure's REPL:
a. Sometimes it's possible to select and delete the REPL prompt
itself, accidentally. It seems to be impossible to do this
intentionally, but it somehow infrequently happens by accident
when clicking to the REPL and attempting to use it. After that,
the REPL won't recognize anything typed into it as a command.
b. (in-ns 'foo) with a formerly nonexistent namespace leaves you
with a useless REPL where "cannot find eval" errors result from
attempting anything, even evaluating an integer literal. This
can easily result from a typo when intending to name an
existing namespace, e.g. (in-ns 'usre).
c. Forgetting to escape a backslash in a string literal (e.g. a
Windows file path) and evaluating. The REPL may start vomiting
nonsensical errors on any input, or just hang after a single
such occurrence.
Sometimes it is possible to recover by clicking the "print last
exception" button, particularly in case a. Case b. is never
recoverable without resorting to a restart, though, and case c is
rarely recoverable.
And, of course, restarting the REPL is frustrating and takes as
long as ten minutes because of bug #1.
Since these issues have been raised on the Enclojure Google Group by
various people repeatedly over the last couple of years, to no effect,
it seems that they need to be raised elsewhere to actually get the
attention they deserve. Bundling them into one post may also help,
since the two bugs are somewhat synergistic, combining to cause much
more annoyance than either would alone -- without bug 1, bug 2 forcing
more frequent REPL restarts would be much more minor, and without bug
2, REPL restarts would be rare enough to make bug 1 much less
annoying.
Someone fix this in Enclojure 1.5 please! At least one of bug 1 and
bug 2c, and preferably all of them.
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