On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Timothy Washington <twash...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm a former java developer, whose tried scala, ruby, etc. And with clojure, > I haven't been this intellectually excited since I designed my first DSL :)
My commercial background is primarily (in historical order): C, C++, Java, CFML - then later Groovy, Scala and now Clojure. Back at university, I worked with Lisp a fair bit (and Prolog) and spent three years doing research on functional language design and implementation - then OO came along (with C++) and steamrollered everything else :) I'm very pleased to see functional programming being taken seriously again these days and attracting people from mainstream / OO backgrounds! > So I'm interested to know if there are any problems and how to address. As Chas and others have hinted, tooling support is fairly immature for Clojure and there's quite a split between the "old school Lispers" with Emacs / Slime / Swank / etc (not intended as a knock but it seems the folks who favor this stuff are long time Emacs and/or Lisp users?) and the "former Java devs" with Eclipse / IntelliJ / NetBeans and their plugins. Even on the build tool side we have Leiningen, Cake and Maven fans. It's hard to tell whether a single choice at any level will become the clear "winner" (and I'm not convinced such a thing would be a good idea). If you have a favorite IDE with your Java / Scala background, there's a Clojure plugin for it that will probably suit you. The game changer is likely to be having a live REPL in your IDE and using it to adopt a very incremental, experimental approach to writing code. I'm just getting into that mode now (after first picking up Clojure about a year ago!) and finding it to be immensely productive - and a radical change to how I used to develop. I find it much easier now to figure out and build up solutions, a piece at a time, teasing tests and small reusable functions out of my experiments so I gradually evolve toward a clean, well-tested solution to each problem. -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/ Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://www.getrailo.com/ "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) -- 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
