On 05/19/2011 02:06 AM, Sean Corfield wrote:
I've actually found the Clojure community to be one of the most welcoming and most helpful of almost any technology that I've picked up in about 30 years. YMMV, I guess, and I'm sure it depends on your programming background.
Same here, except 30 years ago, the technology I may have picked up would have included pacifiers :)
That said, setting things up to work with Clojure really feels like an investment, currently. http://try-clojure.org/ really helped me regarding motivation to get through it. I started using Emacs because of Clojure, after a failed attempt to set up CCW and I don't look back.
After initially installing a Clojure package on Ubuntu, I then learned that it was totally unnecessary for a project using Leiningen ...
Look at "([name doc-string? attr-map? [params*] body] [name doc- string? attr-map? ([params*] body) + attr-map?])".
I'd instinctively expect something? to be optional and something* to mean zero or more. Basic regex and something I've seen in documentation for decades. I'm genuinely surprised you're asserting there are developers out there who would not know that (I'm not denying the possibility, just expressing surprise - it simply wouldn't have occurred to me).
Despite using ? and * in bash, that was not clear to me. I even briefly thought about the use of ? to mark predicates, but of course that makes no sense, here. It's hard to get into the shoes of someone who doesn't know what you know. But all it takes in a case like this is about one or two sentences of explanation.
It's also worth saying that there is a perfectly defensible position that says if you dumb down the documentation and offer too much hand-holding, you will get an influx of programmers whose skill level may lead to a lot of poor code that then gets Clojure a bad reputation as an unmaintainable, poorly performing language. Don't think it can happen? Look at Basic, CFML, PHP which all have a reputation for poorly structured code because of too many n00bs being able to pick them up easily and write bad code.
I even heard complaints about there being way too many bad examples out there for Python. Inevitable, at some point, if a PL goes mainstream, I guess. Luckily, you just need enough users to build a healthy eco-system, not take over the world.
-- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/ -- 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
