I think we need to be careful here about the association between Java and Clojure. Sure, they run on the JVM, but that is their *only* relationship (from a consumer's point of view) as far as I can see.
For me, after a decade+ of developing Enterprise Java (primarily web) applications I am sick and tired of all the hoops and ceremony involved in building Java applications. More and more I am coming (from reading other people's work - not my own discovery!) to realise that most established "best-practice" is only required to answer an insufficiency in the language itself. The thing that most sold me on Clojure (rather than Scala, the main other contender) was the simplicity of the language itself and the low ceremony build-process. To this end, I am absolutely *not* interested in having to live inside a huge complex bit of machinery in order to productively write programs. Eclipse and IntelliJ (and ilk) are necessary for serious Java development mainly because they take the implicit weight of Java applications. I would see it as a failing (maybe too strong) if Clojure required either that much machinery. So, for me, and I appreciate this is maybe unique, I want to go back and basics and learn Clojure "properly". Getting Clojure installed in my nice familiar Java IDE _might_ send the wrong, and very dangerous message that Clojure is on a migration path from Java, when, to my mind, it isn't. It is a completely different language, right down to the fundamental build-deploy cycle. I guess I am saying how much of IDE _whatever_'s functionality is actually helpful in building Clojure applications? As I understand it, large, deep nested packages (a sign of a nicely decomposed Java system) probably isn't the right thing in Clojure. Refactoring support probably isn't required as much because Clojure *seems* easier to write the right thing first time.... I am being naive and simplistic, but hopefully you get my point. I absolutely get that saying "forget IDE _whatever_ and use Emacs" isn't the right thing either, but I do think there is something good about a message of "Clojure is a LISP, which have certain behaviours of development, Emacs is designed for that very purpose and whilst you can use IDE X, maybe you are trying to fit a square peg into a ridiculously heavy and complex hole". I too was pretty disillusioned when, after reading about the "purity" of development with the REPL and the bliss that is LISP development in emacs it turned out that after hours trying to get it all configured, I still couldn't get it working.... A downloaded VM, or a vagrant/ puppet/chef/one line batch/sh script file orr windows (or statically compiled tar.gz) executable would have made life much much simpler. P.S> To be transparent, although I have written millions of LOC of Java on trivial and large enterprise systems, I have written 3 lines of Clojure code, along the lines of (+ 1 2 3). I have spent many hours thinking about what solutions look like in a functional language and have read 4 books on Clojure, so I am viewing this from afar. -- 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
